May 29, 2025 • 54 mins
A conversation with running legend Amby Burfoot. Amby Burfoot stands as a titan in the running world. Crowned the Boston Marathon champion in 1968, he became the first collegian to win this prestigious event and the first American to claim the title since John Kelley in 1957.
As well as a stellar racing career of over 62 years, Amby channeled his passion for running into journalism. He joined Runner’s World magazine in 1978, rising to the position of Editor-in-Chief and then serving as its Editor-at-Large.
As well as being the author of several books on running, he regularly contributes articles to major publications, and curates his weekly Run Long, Run Healthy Newsletter.
We talk about his origin story and the early relationships he cultivated with other notable runners like John J. Kelly the younger, and Bill Rogers.
We discuss the recent performances and new world records coming from the professional marathon field and Amby gives his perspectives on what's driving the performance, and he discusses his skepticism with the authenticity of some of the recent performance given the possibility and prevalence of performance enhancement substances.
We talk about the heightened popularity of running and Amby gives his advice to runners looking to perform, enjoy the sport recreationally, enhance general health and increase longevity in the sport.
About Amby Burfoot on Marathon Handbook: https://marathonhandbook.com/author/amby/
Amby Burfoot's Run Long, Run Healthy Newsletter: https://marathonhandbook.com/run-long-run-healthy-newsletter/
Amby's Books on Running: https://www.ambyburfoot.com/p/buy-autographed-book.html
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As well as a stellar racing career of over 62 years, Amby channeled his passion for running into journalism. He joined Runner’s World magazine in 1978, rising to the position of Editor-in-Chief and then serving as its Editor-at-Large.
As well as being the author of several books on running, he regularly contributes articles to major publications, and curates his weekly Run Long, Run Healthy Newsletter.
We talk about his origin story and the early relationships he cultivated with other notable runners like John J. Kelly the younger, and Bill Rogers.
We discuss the recent performances and new world records coming from the professional marathon field and Amby gives his perspectives on what's driving the performance, and he discusses his skepticism with the authenticity of some of the recent performance given the possibility and prevalence of performance enhancement substances.
We talk about the heightened popularity of running and Amby gives his advice to runners looking to perform, enjoy the sport recreationally, enhance general health and increase longevity in the sport.
About Amby Burfoot on Marathon Handbook: https://marathonhandbook.com/author/amby/
Amby Burfoot's Run Long, Run Healthy Newsletter: https://marathonhandbook.com/run-long-run-healthy-newsletter/
Amby's Books on Running: https://www.ambyburfoot.com/p/buy-autographed-book.html
Follow Us:
Facebook: https://Facebook.com/EventHorizon.Tv
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EventHorizonTv
Instagram: https://instagram.com/eventhorizon.tv
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/EventHorizonTv
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The intersection of endurance, sport, health, fitness, and life, following
the evidence where it leads with the science of self
propelled motion. This is the Endurance Experience podcast, powered by
Event Horizon dot TV and hosted by Tony Rich.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to the Endurance Experience Podcast. I'm Tony Rich. Today
I'm speaking with Amby Burfoot. If you're a runner in
the marathon circles, you're probably familiar with Amby. He is
the nineteen sixty eight winner of the Boston Marathon, boasting
a marathon personal record of two hours and fourteen minutes
(00:46):
and twenty eight seconds, and for many years he has
written for Runners World in was also the editor in
chief at runners World for many years. We have a
conversation about his background and his relationships that many people
(01:07):
may not have known with John J. Kelly the Younger,
as well as Bill Rogers and people like Jeff Galloway,
and he gives us a great explanation of his origin story.
(01:27):
I wanted to get Amby's context on the recent marathon
performance in a professional field, both on the men's side
and the women's side. I wanted to get his perspective
on where's the performance coming from? Is a training, nutrition,
shoe technology or other influences, and wait, do you hear
(01:51):
his take on that? It's very interesting, to say the least.
I wanted the listeners to benefit from some of Ambi's expertise,
and also given that there's so much popularity now in
the marathon. It really is at its height, millions of
(02:14):
marathon and half marathon finishers globally, increased popularity in the
Boston Marathon as well as the world majors, and so
I wanted to get the listeners some of his perspective
about training and some of the popular training discussions about
high volume, lower volume, aerobic verse threshold fueling, nutrition, pacing,
(02:42):
things like that. So he offers some of his wisdom,
and I think runners will get something out of that exchange.
And then finally we talk about aging and high runners
can continue to be healthy and enjoy running as the age,
(03:08):
as he himself continues to run. He's been running for
over sixty years. And so I think if you are
a runner that's been in the sport for several years
and wondering about that and how to increasingly enjoy the
(03:29):
sport as you age, you'll get something out of that exchange.
So this was a great conversation. It was great to
sit down with the legend himself, Andy Burfoot. Please enjoy
the discussion I am on with Amby Burfoot. Thanks for
coming on.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
To the podcast, Tony, it's great to join with you
and talk a little bit about running and fitness.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah. Absolutely, so those people that are listening to this podcast,
Amba is certainly no stranger to you. Long time a
columnists and journalists for Runners World. He also won the
nineteen sixty eight Boston Marathon, and I wanted to talk
(04:21):
with am Be about various different aspects of running, including
some of the recent performances we've seen in the professional field,
men's and women's some unbelievable performances we've seen. I wanted
to talk about just physiology of running and performance in
(04:46):
the marathon, and maybe some things that some listeners can
take away from the conversation with whether it be training, nutrition,
and you know, how to improve performance. But before we
do that, let's just talk about your origin story if
(05:09):
we can, which is very interesting. As a longtime Boston
and resident, born and raised, I know well the legend
of Amby Burfoot, and you know some of the relationships
that you had with some well known runners like Bill
Rogers and John Kelly the Younger. But how about we
(05:34):
start there and you can tell the listeners about your
history and including your background with some of those famous runners.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Well, thank you first for the very nice introduction, Tony.
It's great to be talking with a Bostonian. Of course, people,
I'm so associated with the Boston Marathon that a lot
of people assume or believe that I was born and
raised in Boston, and I should probably say that I've
mostly lived let's say, one hundred miles south of Boston
(06:09):
in the area of Mystic, Connecticut, although of course I
was in Pennsylvania for twenty years during my days at
Runners World, which were one of the many highlights, or
certainly a highlight of my life. So I'm going to
start with the early origin story, and then I'll let
(06:29):
you jump in and ask me a few more prompts.
To keep me going. I like to tell people that
I was the son of a YMCA director type. My
father went to Springfield College and Springfield, mass which is
quite well known for producing young men and women who
go into what was then YMCA's pretty much exclusively and
(06:54):
now is the whole world of fitness gyms, I guess,
so he was an all around athlete, and I grew
up dreaming of being a great all around athlete, which
of course meant the major American sports. As thin as
I am, I thought I could be an end, a
pass receiving end in football. I thought I could be
(07:16):
a great jump shooting guard in basketball, and I thought
I could be a great third basement in baseball. Third
was the position that I played in baseball, and because
I had and have an obsessive personality for some reason,
I used to practice those sports endlessly every day after
(07:40):
school two three hours a day, weekends five or six
hours a day, various kinds of games, often with myself
in the driveway of the front yard, practicing skills in
those sports. And unlike a lot of runners who aren't
very coordinated, as we all know, I did get it
(08:00):
skilled in sports, and there were things I could do
in the sports world solo entirely on my own, which
showed all the practice. But what I didn't understand and
didn't learn until I got to high school, was they
let other players on the court at the same time
as you, and those other players were trying to stop
(08:21):
you from showing off your skills. And in basketball in particular,
I learned that I could shoot as well as anyone
on the team, but I couldn't jump like the others.
I wasn't as fast as the others. If they waved
a hand in front of my face, that disconnected me
(08:42):
enough so that my shooting was off. Basically, I learned
that to be good in the great traditional American sports,
you had to be fast and muscular and strong and
powerful as well as skilled, and I was lacking in
all the fast speed power elements. So my basketball career ended.
(09:04):
In tenth grade. One day we were practicing. I was
the worst player on the JV team. The good news
I made the JV team. I got past the final cup.
But I was the worst player on the team. And
one day we were having a bad practice and the
coach got really ticked off at us, and he said,
you guys are smelling up my basketball court. I don't
(09:27):
want you in here. Go out there and run, go
run the cross country course for punishment, so he forced
us to go outside and run the three mile cross
country course. And there I was with these twelve or
fifteen guys who were better at basketball players than I was,
but it turned out in cross country that I beat
(09:47):
them back by quite a margin. I had more endurance
and they had the speed. And that was the beginning
of my transition to cross country because I thought, well,
amby a brain teaser, here, would you like to keep
being the worst player on the basketball team or would
you like to try something new where maybe you would
(10:08):
have some potential? So I tried the new.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Nice And then how did you so I understand John Kelly?
How did you cultivate the relationship with John Kelly.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I had the extraordinarily good luck of just randomly, by happenstance,
being a student at the high school where John Kelly
was a high school language teacher, and you did correct
him correctly at the outset, which many people do not.
This was John Kelly, the younger who won the Boston
(10:48):
Marathon in nineteen fifty seven, made two Olympic teams in
the in the marathon in fifty six and sixty. It
was basically the best runner in America for a full
deck gate. He was not the old John Kelly, not
even related to him, despite the similar names. The old
John Kelly was the one who I think ran fifty
(11:11):
eight Boston Marathons. My John Kelly probably ran thirty or
thirty five in total, but as I said, he won
in fifty seven and was the top runner in the US.
And by happenstance, I show up for cross country one
day and he's the coach, and he's about half my height.
Of course, he's a little scrawny five foot six inch guy,
(11:35):
and he says, okay, let's go, and I don't know
anything about cross country running. We all follow him out
the door. He was running with us. Of course, he
wasn't holding a bull whip over us. He was one
of us. He was not the lord and master. And
the first thing he did was scramble over a stone
(11:56):
wall light into a big patch of bramble that scratched
our legs to bleeding. Found a trail that led down
through an old apple orchard and eventually to the edges
of Long Island Sound, where we ran off and through
water inlets, getting our feet soaked as we ran. Because
(12:17):
he was one hundred and one percent a naturalist and
a believer in the natural environment and becoming part of it.
So we never ran a single workout with John Kelly
on the track. We didn't have to do ten times
four hundred, like every other poor kid in America. We
(12:38):
went out into these wild places where we returned wet
and bloodied and a few other things. But it was
somehow spirit liberating to run with John. The other thing, well,
there were so many things that were amazing about John Kelly.
He totally changed my life and put me on the
path I've been on ever. But I think the number
(13:02):
one thing was just that he was curious about everything
in the world. And he was not just a great
runner and a great language teacher, but he followed the
modern music of the day. He knew every Bob Dylan lyrics.
He read every book that was out there. He thought
Henry David Throw and Rachel Carson were the great writers
(13:29):
for all time because of their belief in a simple,
natural lifestyle without pesticides. He had an organic garden when
nobody knew what an organic garden was. This was in
the fifties. Instead of writing, instead of driving his polluting
vehicle to school, he would ride a bicycle to his
(13:49):
job at the school and come back by bicycle. He
called the car the infernal combustion engine, not the internal
because the pollution. So he was so far ahead of
his time. He just lit a beacon that many, many
of us were fortunate enough to see where that light
(14:10):
was shining and to follow it with him. So I
have been eternally grateful at this lucky fortune that I
had to be his students in high school.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah, fortunate for you. He sounds like an amazing person.
And what about Bill Rogers? Bill Rogers was a peer?
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yes, yes, Bill Rogers and Jeff Galloway, I should say,
who was a great influence on American running. Bill and
Jeff and I were college classmates and cross country mates
at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, this small liberal arts
(14:50):
school that's mainly known for its devotion to the liberal arts.
I mean, we were a radical group of freethinking people
at Wesland, and for some strange reason, three of us
were particularly free thinking in the distance running department. Jeff
(15:10):
was a year or two older than I and on
campus when I was arrived, and Bill came on two
years later, and we just loved running and challenging ourselves.
And Jeff was very Jeff was very mild mannered, but
very disciplined and tough and strict when it came to
(15:33):
regular training, and all I had to do was fallen
behind him in the same way that I had fallen
in behind coach John Kelly in high school. And I
got a huge benefit from just following Jeff around for
a couple of years At Wesleyan. Bill came along several
years later, as I said, and he was not like
(15:55):
me and Jeff in the sense of being disciplined and
really determined and focused to become a great runner, not
at that point in his life, certainly later so Bill,
for example, we actually roomed together for a year or two,
and on Saturday nights he would disappear and go to
(16:16):
some rock and roll bars somewhere down the Turnpike and
dance and drink the night away with his former high
school buddies. And me, I was the guy who went
to bed at nine thirty every night so I could
get up the next morning at six thirty. And on
the weekends I was getting up at six thirty and
running twenty miles, which was not your normal college existence
(16:41):
back in the nineteen sixties nor now, I don't think.
But again, I was completely obsessed by the possibility that
I could become a successful athlete and running. Having given
up the basketball and baseball dreams, I had found my sport.
At that point, I was completely convinced that whoever trained
(17:04):
the hardest and the most would win the race. Not
a belief that I still hold, but I did hold
it then, and my thinking was very simple, if all
it takes is hard work, I'm going to work harder
and everybody else and see what I can win. And
it turned out to be a fairly successful formula.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah. Wow, I think you know somewhere there's got to
be someone that could write a movie about this. I
never really knew about all of these relationships. I want
to get some of your perspective on the marathon and
some of the marathon performances that we've seen as of late,
(17:51):
and particularly in the pro field. I mean, we had
Ilia Kipchogey put up some pretty stellar times in the
exhibition field running the sub two, and then you know,
we had Calvin kipt them come behind him and run
(18:13):
a couple of marathons faster than he'd ever run. And
you know, in the women's field, we've had some great
performances in the women's field. I'm just curious to get
your take on this. I mean, where do you think
the performance is coming from? And is it training? Is
(18:37):
it nutrition? Shoe technology? Is it wearable technology? Is a
combination of all of these elements? Where do you stand?
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Well? First of all, I'm not sure that any of
us can entirely understand or explain some of the amazing
performances that you've just to But I will get to
your direct question in a moment. But first I'm going
to tell you a story about Elliot Kipchoge that you
have not heard before. In about two thousand and five,
(19:13):
my wife and I and about a dozen other American
normal regular runner type folks went on a running tour
of Kenya. Were led by a fellow, an American who
had grown up in Kenya and in doing so learned
to love the culture, the people, the language and everything.
(19:36):
So he could speak Swahili and some of the dialects
so he could really dial us in to the running
scene in Kenya. And one afternoon he took us to
the training camp where there were about a dozen sponsored runners.
I think they were Nike sponsored runners even back then,
(19:58):
and again this is twenty years This was two thousand
and five or so, and we were going to go
on a run with the Kenyan runners, which sounds intimidating, right, Well,
it was intimidating. And what made it even a little
bit different was that my wife decided she wanted to
run with us that day. She's a runner, okay, she's
(20:19):
run a dozen marathons. She knows what she's doing, but
she wasn't in great shape. She wasn't training much. Then.
Of course, we're seven thousand feet in the Rift Valley
of Kenya, so she's not going to be able to run.
But let's say eleven minutes per mile, which doesn't sound
(20:39):
very much like a Kenyan pace. Nonetheless, I walked to
the front of the group and I raised my hand
and I say, I've got a question. Would any of
you guys be willing to run eleven minutes per mile
with us? Slow, slow, slow Americans? And Elliot Kipchoge steps
to the front of the circle and says, sure, I'll
(21:00):
run eleven minutes per mile with you guys, and he did,
and the three of us, my wife, me and Elliot
jogged down the road, watched the others disappear up in
front of us instantly, and ran our four miles at
eleven minutes per mile. So what's the point of the story?
Good question. I think Elliot Kipchogi simply has the best
(21:25):
mentality of any runner that we've ever known, and he
showed it that day in the fact that he realized
that running four miles super slow with a bunch of
a couple of slow Americans did not mean that he
was a lesser runner. It did not mean he was
going to get out of shape with one slow jog
(21:46):
that afternoon. It did not mean that just because his
other Kenyans took off down the road ahead of him,
that he couldn't run with them or faster any other day.
He just has it all together mentally. He understands what's
important and he doesn't waste energy on what's not important.
(22:06):
And of course that's a huge asset to any runner,
and I think Elliot has it in spades. He really
his mind is just it's a fool proof he's just
got it all.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
No, how are people running under two hours like Elliott
did in an exhibition race, And how are they doing
two oh two every weekend? Two hours and two minutes
and every marathon every weekend? Certainly we know two or
three minutes is coming from the shoes. I think we
all truly believe that now. When I grew up, we
(22:44):
absolutely every runner and every marathon tried to run in
the thinnest, lightest shoe they could possibly stand, because we
all knew that the way to be fast was to
have nothing on your feet, and the lightest shoes, which
were the closest to nothing, were the fastest shoes. Now
these guys are running in these big, foamy sandwich of
(23:07):
these shoes, which looked like they would be like running
on a pillow, where you would just collapse and get
no energy return at all. But instead the shoes are
cushiony and energy returning at the same time. It's just
a miracle of technology. I never thought i'd see it,
but I can't ignore what's in front of my face
(23:30):
and all of our faces now. And the funny thing is,
of course, that every self respecting marathon or even if
they're three hours or four hours or five hours, now
seems to feel that they need to buy a pair
of two hundred and fifty dollars super shoes, because you know,
it's like you're not a runner if you're running in
one of those lightweight, thin soled things. It's hard to believe.
(23:53):
We people were barefoot running fifteen years ago because they
thought that was the breakthrough, and now we've gone in
the other direction. The nutritional aspect is really interesting, but
it's so much harder to actually prove. But people are
certainly taking in a lot more carbohydrates as they run now,
(24:13):
and the gels. Instead of having you know, thirty grams
of carbohydrate on board, they've got forty or sixty, and
some of them more than that. And people are actually
doing this thing called gut training, which is training your
stomach to be able to tolerate a lot of gels,
which are essentially sugar, to tolerate that in the stomach
(24:37):
without getting you know, nausea and worse from too much sugar.
I don't know how people are doing it, but they are,
and you know, and we go from there to things
like sodium bicarbonate and vasodilators, beetroot juice, people trying everything,
(25:01):
and for some people it seems that it's working, or
people have just placeboed themselves into believing that if you
take six different nutritional supplements you'll run better six different ways.
And as I said, we don't know, but there's no
denying how fast people are going these days. It's quite remarkable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, and you so you ran in nineteen sixty eight,
two twenty two seventeen was your time to win the
Boston Marathon, and you pr two fourteen twenty eight that
year as well. Would you ever conceive that there would
(25:46):
be a woman under two ten? Ruth kepn Gedich ran
under to ten at Chicago. I talked to I mean,
you probably familiar with Andrew Jones, had a conversation with him.
Also thinks that a couple of minutes are coming from
the shoes. And then obviously the East African runners have
(26:07):
continually just gotten better. They've always outperformed. They seem like
they're getting better. Perhaps money's a powerful motivator. It's just
hard to figure out how human performance could improve that much.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Yes, I've had a very hard time figuring out how
human performance could improve that much. Tony, and I want
to say that I'm a huge fan of and proponent
of women's running. I'm a huge believer in the East
African runners, but I'm a little bit skeptical, unfortunately, of
(26:48):
the Ruth Chepngettitch's two nine at Chicago. When I look
at the performance what I see was that she was
a consistent TOWO fourteen or two fifteen, theen runner. A
few years earlier. She seemed to be slowing down a
little bit in her career, which happens to everybody at
(27:09):
some point, and then totally out of nowhere, she produces
this startling performance which nobody has come close to in
the last six months. Of course, it's going to take
a lot more months than six to really see if
other women can get down there. I am skeptical of
(27:29):
that performance. We do know that there has been unfortunately
too much doping going on in Kenya in recent years.
I had no suspicions whatsoever of the great Kenyan runners
for decades and decades before the current epoch. Now I
have to say I have some suspicions. Some of them
(27:52):
have performance arcs which just don't look natural to me,
and I have no whatsoever. I'd be the first to
admit it. It's possible that Ruth Chapping gettit's just had
faster Nike shoes than anybody else ever did, or that
she he's an extremely positive responder to super shoes. Some
(28:16):
people get a big boost from super shoes. Some people
actually run slower in super shoes. It's completely individual, and
we don't know anything about Ruth chappingingetits and her shoes
and how she ran two a nine last fall in Chicago.
But it blew my mind, and not in a good way.
(28:38):
And that's more than enough set about that.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
We'll see what happens, I think, But I think getting
that perspective from you is very interesting. What about wearable tech?
Wearable technology? AI? Do you see that that is a
big influence.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Well, there's certainly no denying that we're surrounded by wearable tech,
including things that I'm sure I'm not even aware of.
I did not have a GPS watch myself until about
two months ago, and I'll be damned if I've figured
out how to use the thing yet. Just getting it
(29:22):
to start when I start my run seems to be
a challenge, and I certainly don't have any other tech
other than And this came as a surprise to me.
I never listened to music when I ran because I'm
just that much of not that much of a music
head like everybody else, and I wanted to focus on
(29:44):
my run. But I have become a big consumer of podcasts.
When I go out and run now, and you know,
I'm seventy eight years old. I don't run nearly as
fast as I used to. I'm just trying to stay
out there and stay comfortable and stay fit. And I
find that I really enjoyed listening to podcasts while I'm running.
(30:08):
So that's that's my favorite piece of performance. Performance tech
in general, I don't see that performance tech can possibly
do too much beyond the accumulated wisdom, the accumulated training,
the accumulated trial and error experiments of all the runners
(30:30):
who have come before today. I mean, people have run
two hundred miles a week, people have done hill training,
people have had blood testing to see what their iron
stores and carbohydrates are. You know, people have done all
of these things. It's much easier and quicker and less
intrusive to do them now. But I'm not sure how
(30:53):
much performance is really gaining from it. It's just it's fun.
It's fun to wonder about. Of course, we all, you know,
we all got interested in our heart rate at a
certain point because we could get our heart rate by
simply feeling our wrists or neck or wherever for a pulse.
And I did that for a while, but after a
(31:14):
while as you the more experienced the runner you are,
the less you tend to rely on all of the gizmos,
and the more you learn to rely on how you
feel today. Do you feel good today, then go for it.
Do you feel not so good today, then maybe you
need a recovery day or two before you do your
(31:35):
next hard one.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah. We had John Career and the Boston Marathon. Just
won the Boston Marathon and he I think they interviewed him.
He said that he's looking to target two one for
the remainder of the year. So and I think that
this is just incredible. I mean, now if somebody runs too,
(31:58):
I think ran two a five something around two five
in London, and they're looking at him as he didn't
have a good race, right, It's like, now you've got
to go under two h five to be perceived to
have a good race.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
So well, yeah, and you and you know John Career
should be targeting two a one because he's at the
cusp of it now and everyone at the elite level.
You get to a certain point and you know if
you don't want to slow down, you want to keep
getting faster. But you know, the when it comes to
training a couple of things we know are if you
(32:34):
train more, you'll get better, and if you train more.
If you train more again, you'll get better. And if
you train more again, you'll get injured. If you train faster,
you'll get better. If you train faster again, you'll get better,
And if you train faster again, you'll get injured. So
there's only so much the human body can take before
it makes you back down and try again and perhaps
(32:58):
be a little bit smarter the second time around.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, okay, we'll see what I see what happens. It
won't be long before we'll be talking about another outstanding
performance and maybe someone will go under under two in
a in an open event, a regulation open event. So
(33:21):
let's let's bring it down to the amateur level, right,
And so you talked a little bit about, you know,
some of the factors contributing to performance. Right. So Boston
Marathon is getting really popular, more popular than it ever
has been. And I think that you know, some of
this has been fueled by this concept of the majors, right,
(33:43):
the majors and you know, amateur runners. Last time I
looked at the numbers, somewhere around a few million people
are finishing marathons and half marathons around the globe on
a yearly basis, So a lot of people are getting
into marathon and so it's fueling a lot of these
(34:05):
conversations about performance and on social media, everyone wants to
talk about, oh, you should do this type of training
that type of training, low volume, high volume, zone two threshold.
So where do you stand on this for the average person.
If you were to give advice to the amateur marathon
(34:28):
or looking to cultivate their training, how would you describe?
You know, well, do you have any particular mantras like
volume is king?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, that's a great question, Tony, in one that everybody
is asking because, as you have noted, marathoning and half
marathoning has seems to have reached a popularity peak. Now,
we had the COVID pandemic, which was a major blow
to racing. You just couldn't go and run with people
at racis. We all remember some of those post COVID
(35:03):
races and how weird they were what we had to
go through with the start and finishing in between. But
now we're past that, thank goodness. And somehow during COVID
more people than previously got the message that running was
a little solitary sport. You could go out and do
(35:23):
it by yourself. You wouldn't infect anyone or get infected
if you were out there doing it solitary. It was
better than staying in the house all damn day long.
You couldn't go to the gym, etc. Etc. More people
seem to come up with an understanding of running, and
once you start it, if you have a little bit
(35:45):
of luck and improvement, of course, there's a big flashing
light in front of you that says, qualify for the
Boston Marathon. Qualify for the Boston Marathon. And I think
that and other similar races were which these days you
almost have to qualify for everything. Races are so popular
(36:05):
and so hard to get into. So everybody wants to
get a little bit faster, of course, and hit a
BQ or sub three hours or sub four whatever their
goal is. And the goals, of course, are all over
the place. Because some of the people are just out
(36:27):
of college. They're twenty, they're young, strong with incredibly elastic tendons,
with long strides, and they can fly when they run.
And some of them are midlife women whose kids have
finally gone off to college. So they got a little
bit more time on their hands, and they'd like to
train and have a goal because women are incredibly disciplined
(36:49):
and consistent and successful at running. And then some of
us are seventy eight as I am, and we have
no elasticity left in our legs, and my stride is
about one point seven inches long if I even actually
managed to get my lead foot off the ground. So
(37:10):
we're all coming at it in a different place. And
my advice to people the simple approach is basically, you know,
if you can run a few more miles per week
and you can do it healthier, you're going to get faster.
And if you get a little bit faster, you should
probably try to add a few more miles after that.
(37:33):
Because for most of us, I don't want to say
mileager volume is king, but easy running is the best
and safest way to improve your time. If you need
something more dramatic, then of course you've got to do
the occasional slightly faster training pace. And I think tempo
(37:58):
or lactate threshold training pace is a good effort about
your half marathon speed because it's up tempo, but it's
not destructive, it doesn't tear down your muscles and joints
and everything. And of course, if you want to break
four minutes in the mile and qualify for the US
(38:20):
Olympic team, then you got to get on the track
and go back to running those damnable ten four hundred
meters and under sixty seconds or whatever I mean. These days,
they probably do them in fifty six seconds. So you
pick your goal and you adjust your training from there.
(38:40):
Most runners are midlife runners, which is to say they've
got a family, a job, a community, volunteer work, and
that just doesn't leave them time to run one hundred
miles a week. So one hundred is for the professionals,
and anything else is for people to decide how it
(39:03):
fits into their life in the best way possible for
both health and fitness. And finally, my big message from
where I am in life these days is that every
mile that you run today, no matter what age you're at,
should be a You should be able, You should be
(39:25):
looking forward to that point when you're my age, and
how is today's mile going to keep me running healthy
and motivated and happy and joyfully when I'm fifty or
sixty or seventy. And that is the big goal, because
I am slower than I've ever been at any time
(39:47):
in my life, and tomorrow I'll be slower than I
am today. But running is out some are more important
to me than it has ever been at any other time,
because I'm surrounded by people my age who are not
as healthy and fit as I am, unfortunately, and their
lives do not look very appealing to me, with the
(40:08):
right wheelchairs and the halting walks and the inability to
climb a flight of stairs, never mind, go on a
cool adventure vacation and climb the Pyramids and Mexico, as
I've done a few times and enjoyed. So train for
train for when you're seventy five. Train smart today so
(40:30):
that you'll still be doing it when you're seventy five.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah, yeah, On on what you mentioned about, you know,
Boston and qualifying, So it's getting harder to get into
Boston Marathon. And I think now, if you're a mail
in your twenties or thirties, you need to run sub three,
which is unbelievable, I mean, but that's what you have
(40:54):
to do if you're a male in your twenties or thirties,
And then you know the women's times are about thirty
thirty minutes slower than that.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Well, first of all, I agree with you entirely. It's
extremely difficult to qualify for the Boston Marathon. What is it,
ten or twelve percent of the population only is fast
enough to qualify at each age group. So if you
are not capable of qualifying, you're in very good company.
(41:26):
There are a lot of people with you. And secondly,
while running the Boston Marathon is a fantastic thing, it
is not a major measure of life, happiness and success.
And if you can't qualify for the Boston Marathon, there
(41:47):
are still plenty of other marathons around the world in
fantastic locations which will take you if you get entered
kind of early. And there are certainly many many other
races at other distances that you can participate in and
challenge yourself with. And to repeat what I'm going to
(42:09):
keep repeating, qualifying for the Boston Marathon isn't quite as
important as being able to run healthy when you're seventy five,
And I would really really tell people that that's what
should be a focus of your running. How are you
going to organize your life and your fitness and your
(42:30):
family so that you can still run when you're seventy five,
and heck, it's even a little bit easier to win
age group awards when you're seventy five. So there's a
reward out there. You just got to keep going for it.
And of course the bigger reward is being healthy and
hale and hardy and active and energetic and feeling good
(42:52):
about life at a time when frankly, a lot of
people don't feel good about life because of seventy five.
You can see the downslope ahead and that that's a
challenging mental situation for many people. But if you're still
active and healthy, you've got some good tools to fight
it with.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, now I talk about that. So there's a lot
of you know, former elite runners that are coming back.
You see Joan Joan Benoit, she comes back and run
a couple of times, run a couple of marathons. Paula
Radcliffe is jumping back in, and we even see you know, MEB,
(43:37):
MEB jumping back in and doing and they're all doing it,
you know, sort of recreationally. How did you know? So
you've been running what over fifty years? Correct?
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I think over sixty at this twenty years.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah, and so at your at your peak, you probably
were running one hundred and hundred over one hundred and
twenty miles a week.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
I ran at my peak for oh for almost a decade.
I was at one hundred miles a week or over,
and I decided to change that almost overnight, and I
switched in nineteen seventy six. So that was almost what
fifty years ago, and I've been running twenty five or
(44:22):
thirty miles a week since, and I'm absolutely steady and consistent.
I still love running, I love other activities. I go
to the gym as skinny and weak as I am,
which is not a good thing. I do lift weights
for twenty or thirty minutes a week. You wouldn't know
it to look at me, or the very modest weights
(44:45):
that I'm lifting, often just my body weight. But I'm
doing that too, and I'm just enjoying the fact that
I can still do these things, and I want to
be able to keep doing them as long as I
possibly can. So you run the miles and the speed
that you can at a particular time of life, and
you realize that there are periods of life when you
(45:09):
can't do too much, but there will be periods of
life even later maybe retirement, which is a great thing
if you have a good retirement, there will be periods
when you can do more. And you definitely want to
be fit and healthy enough in retirement to start having
some real fun with the adventure runs and races and
(45:33):
travel that you can put together.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, and that's really the key. I think some of
the challenges that endurance athletes have is trying to moderate
your running as you get older, and then people end
up either mentally burning out physically burning out after they
(45:56):
realize the prs are in the rear view mirror now,
and so some of that is definitely hard to deal with.
And so I think you know, some of the elite
runners that are coming back and running and showing everyone
that you can still do this recreationally and still have
fun and still enjoy it. It's very important.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
I think you've hit on a very key and important
point there, Tony. You're right. A lot of people I
know get to the point where they can no longer
break three hours. Let's say, because I've known a lot
of good runners in my day, and when they can't
break three hours, they're like, what's the point, And maybe
they just quit running all together. And that's absolutely a
(46:43):
terrible mistake to make. And some of them come back
twenty years later, fortunately, and slowly work themselves into shape.
But the real problem is mid life in America for
many many people means less activity and more weight. And
(47:06):
you know, if you gain one or two pounds per year,
which is the average, doesn't sound like much after two
or three years, But if you add it up after
twenty or thirty years, two or three decades, suddenly you're
forty or fifty pounds heavier than you were when you
were thirty or forty. You haven't exercised in a long time,
(47:28):
and that's a real recipe for disaster, and it's also
a huge impediment to starting to get fit again. I mean,
it's really hard to exercise when you're fifty pounds overweight.
I don't blame anyone for having difficulty with that. It's
just extraordinarily hard. So I tell people, if at all possible,
(47:53):
keep moving whatever you can and try really hard not
to gain those mid life pounds because they will. They
will get after you when you turn sixty or seventy,
and you won't be appreciating them at all.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Those are some wise words for sure. Okay, so now
how can people see some of your articles? Are? Are
you still writing for Runners World?
Speaker 3 (48:23):
I'm now writing for an interesting outfit called Marathonhandbook dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
They can be found very easily with that name Marathon
Handbook on the web. They've got a huge readership despite
the fact that they're not very well known. They're an
interesting group of people from Spain and Toronto and Costa
Rica and a few other places that have just kind
(48:52):
of bended together with passion and some good editorial quality
to do a very very deep website which is all
about marathon and endurance performance for the most part.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah, okay, we'll look for you there, and then your
own website we can find you at. Is is it
a nbe birfoot dot com?
Speaker 3 (49:19):
It is that there's not a whole lot of information there,
but it does point. It does point in different directions,
and I'm not difficult to find. I'm not trying to
hide from anybody like everybody else.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
I'm not a.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
Massive social media influencer, so I don't have to hide
and duck away. So people can find me if they're interested,
and I'm always happy to talk running with people who
are interested in making it a key part of their life.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
And of course we can run into you at some
start lines. You're still running, right, You're still running Boston
Marathon when you can, when you.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Can Boston Marathon. I've run more times in the last
decade than any other time in my life. And I
have a Thanksgiving Day race that I've now run sixty
two years in a row, which I think is a
world record for consecutive race finishes. Fortunately it's only a
five miler, but I can tell you it's challenging to
(50:20):
run the same race on the same day for sixty
two years in a row, because life does have surprises
for all of us, and some of those surprises are
not very pleasant and you really have to battle to
get past them.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Wow. Incredible sixty two years.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
So that's more than Johnny A. Kelly ran the Boston Marathon.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Johnny A. Kelly is old. John is everybody's hero in
lifetime running pursuit as I am. He had the misfortune
actually of starting a little bit later in life than
I did, so starting early helps you out. And of
course he was running the marathon every year rather than
my puny little five miler, so's he's my hero forever.
(51:09):
I'm not trying to outdo him. I'm simply trying to
set my own path.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah wow, Well thanks for that and thanks for your time.
You've got some very interesting takes from you. So I
think in a year from now, if I have run
into you, you know, we'll be talking about some of
the the performances that have surpassed the performances of today.
(51:35):
So we'll i interested to have you back when we can.
So thanks again for.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Your time, Tony, thank you so much. There's no doubt
people are going to continue running farther and faster than
we've ever seen, and so we'll be back to talking
about it again another day.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
Thanks again to the legend Andy burr Foot. In the
show notes, you can find links to ambiburfoot dot com
as well as Marathonhandbook dot com. Definitely interesting hearing some
of his takes on recent pro marathon performance, as well
as his advice for amateur runners on running with efficiency,
(52:24):
running for performance, and running for longevity. Most of all,
and running is more popular than ever. Over a million
people in the London Marathon lottery, over a million people worldwide.
(52:44):
It's very very interesting news and positive news for the
sport of running. So hopefully all the new runners and
the veterans got something out of this podcast with Amby
and Hey. After your listen to this, go out and
get a few miles in. It's good to be back
(53:05):
behind the mic after taking some time off during our
busier time of the year in April. Have some fascinating
guests coming up on the Endurance Experience, Science and evidence
based podcast on endurance sports, so stay tuned to the
(53:27):
podcast and hopefully you'll give us your ear in the
sea of podcasts that are out there now. Thank you
for your time.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Follow event Horizon Endurance Sport on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and
x for training and nutrition programs and on demand learning.
To become a member of our Endurance Institute, or for
complete archives of podcasts, blog on to our website Event
(54:03):
Horizon dot tv.
The intersection of endurance, sport, health, fitness, and life, following
the evidence where it leads with the science of self
propelled motion. This is the Endurance Experience podcast, powered by
Event Horizon dot TV and hosted by Tony Rich.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to the Endurance Experience Podcast. I'm Tony Rich. Today
I'm speaking with Amby Burfoot. If you're a runner in
the marathon circles, you're probably familiar with Amby. He is
the nineteen sixty eight winner of the Boston Marathon, boasting
a marathon personal record of two hours and fourteen minutes
(00:46):
and twenty eight seconds, and for many years he has
written for Runners World in was also the editor in
chief at runners World for many years. We have a
conversation about his background and his relationships that many people
(01:07):
may not have known with John J. Kelly the Younger,
as well as Bill Rogers and people like Jeff Galloway,
and he gives us a great explanation of his origin story.
(01:27):
I wanted to get Amby's context on the recent marathon
performance in a professional field, both on the men's side
and the women's side. I wanted to get his perspective
on where's the performance coming from? Is a training, nutrition,
shoe technology or other influences, and wait, do you hear
(01:51):
his take on that? It's very interesting, to say the least.
I wanted the listeners to benefit from some of Ambi's expertise,
and also given that there's so much popularity now in
the marathon. It really is at its height, millions of
(02:14):
marathon and half marathon finishers globally, increased popularity in the
Boston Marathon as well as the world majors, and so
I wanted to get the listeners some of his perspective
about training and some of the popular training discussions about
high volume, lower volume, aerobic verse threshold fueling, nutrition, pacing,
(02:42):
things like that. So he offers some of his wisdom,
and I think runners will get something out of that exchange.
And then finally we talk about aging and high runners
can continue to be healthy and enjoy running as the age,
(03:08):
as he himself continues to run. He's been running for
over sixty years. And so I think if you are
a runner that's been in the sport for several years
and wondering about that and how to increasingly enjoy the
(03:29):
sport as you age, you'll get something out of that exchange.
So this was a great conversation. It was great to
sit down with the legend himself, Andy Burfoot. Please enjoy
the discussion I am on with Amby Burfoot. Thanks for
coming on.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
To the podcast, Tony, it's great to join with you
and talk a little bit about running and fitness.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah. Absolutely, so those people that are listening to this podcast,
Amba is certainly no stranger to you. Long time a
columnists and journalists for Runners World. He also won the
nineteen sixty eight Boston Marathon, and I wanted to talk
(04:21):
with am Be about various different aspects of running, including
some of the recent performances we've seen in the professional field,
men's and women's some unbelievable performances we've seen. I wanted
to talk about just physiology of running and performance in
(04:46):
the marathon, and maybe some things that some listeners can
take away from the conversation with whether it be training, nutrition,
and you know, how to improve performance. But before we
do that, let's just talk about your origin story if
(05:09):
we can, which is very interesting. As a longtime Boston
and resident, born and raised, I know well the legend
of Amby Burfoot, and you know some of the relationships
that you had with some well known runners like Bill
Rogers and John Kelly the Younger. But how about we
(05:34):
start there and you can tell the listeners about your
history and including your background with some of those famous runners.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Well, thank you first for the very nice introduction, Tony.
It's great to be talking with a Bostonian. Of course, people,
I'm so associated with the Boston Marathon that a lot
of people assume or believe that I was born and
raised in Boston, and I should probably say that I've
mostly lived let's say, one hundred miles south of Boston
(06:09):
in the area of Mystic, Connecticut, although of course I
was in Pennsylvania for twenty years during my days at
Runners World, which were one of the many highlights, or
certainly a highlight of my life. So I'm going to
start with the early origin story, and then I'll let
(06:29):
you jump in and ask me a few more prompts.
To keep me going. I like to tell people that
I was the son of a YMCA director type. My
father went to Springfield College and Springfield, mass which is
quite well known for producing young men and women who
go into what was then YMCA's pretty much exclusively and
(06:54):
now is the whole world of fitness gyms, I guess,
so he was an all around athlete, and I grew
up dreaming of being a great all around athlete, which
of course meant the major American sports. As thin as
I am, I thought I could be an end, a
pass receiving end in football. I thought I could be
(07:16):
a great jump shooting guard in basketball, and I thought
I could be a great third basement in baseball. Third
was the position that I played in baseball, and because
I had and have an obsessive personality for some reason,
I used to practice those sports endlessly every day after
(07:40):
school two three hours a day, weekends five or six
hours a day, various kinds of games, often with myself
in the driveway of the front yard, practicing skills in
those sports. And unlike a lot of runners who aren't
very coordinated, as we all know, I did get it
(08:00):
skilled in sports, and there were things I could do
in the sports world solo entirely on my own, which
showed all the practice. But what I didn't understand and
didn't learn until I got to high school, was they
let other players on the court at the same time
as you, and those other players were trying to stop
(08:21):
you from showing off your skills. And in basketball in particular,
I learned that I could shoot as well as anyone
on the team, but I couldn't jump like the others.
I wasn't as fast as the others. If they waved
a hand in front of my face, that disconnected me
(08:42):
enough so that my shooting was off. Basically, I learned
that to be good in the great traditional American sports,
you had to be fast and muscular and strong and
powerful as well as skilled, and I was lacking in
all the fast speed power elements. So my basketball career ended.
(09:04):
In tenth grade. One day we were practicing. I was
the worst player on the JV team. The good news
I made the JV team. I got past the final cup.
But I was the worst player on the team. And
one day we were having a bad practice and the
coach got really ticked off at us, and he said,
you guys are smelling up my basketball court. I don't
(09:27):
want you in here. Go out there and run, go
run the cross country course for punishment, so he forced
us to go outside and run the three mile cross
country course. And there I was with these twelve or
fifteen guys who were better at basketball players than I was,
but it turned out in cross country that I beat
(09:47):
them back by quite a margin. I had more endurance
and they had the speed. And that was the beginning
of my transition to cross country because I thought, well,
amby a brain teaser, here, would you like to keep
being the worst player on the basketball team or would
you like to try something new where maybe you would
(10:08):
have some potential? So I tried the new.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Nice And then how did you so I understand John Kelly?
How did you cultivate the relationship with John Kelly.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I had the extraordinarily good luck of just randomly, by happenstance,
being a student at the high school where John Kelly
was a high school language teacher, and you did correct
him correctly at the outset, which many people do not.
This was John Kelly, the younger who won the Boston
(10:48):
Marathon in nineteen fifty seven, made two Olympic teams in
the in the marathon in fifty six and sixty. It
was basically the best runner in America for a full
deck gate. He was not the old John Kelly, not
even related to him, despite the similar names. The old
John Kelly was the one who I think ran fifty
(11:11):
eight Boston Marathons. My John Kelly probably ran thirty or
thirty five in total, but as I said, he won
in fifty seven and was the top runner in the US.
And by happenstance, I show up for cross country one
day and he's the coach, and he's about half my height.
Of course, he's a little scrawny five foot six inch guy,
(11:35):
and he says, okay, let's go, and I don't know
anything about cross country running. We all follow him out
the door. He was running with us. Of course, he
wasn't holding a bull whip over us. He was one
of us. He was not the lord and master. And
the first thing he did was scramble over a stone
(11:56):
wall light into a big patch of bramble that scratched
our legs to bleeding. Found a trail that led down
through an old apple orchard and eventually to the edges
of Long Island Sound, where we ran off and through
water inlets, getting our feet soaked as we ran. Because
(12:17):
he was one hundred and one percent a naturalist and
a believer in the natural environment and becoming part of it.
So we never ran a single workout with John Kelly
on the track. We didn't have to do ten times
four hundred, like every other poor kid in America. We
(12:38):
went out into these wild places where we returned wet
and bloodied and a few other things. But it was
somehow spirit liberating to run with John. The other thing, well,
there were so many things that were amazing about John Kelly.
He totally changed my life and put me on the
path I've been on ever. But I think the number
(13:02):
one thing was just that he was curious about everything
in the world. And he was not just a great
runner and a great language teacher, but he followed the
modern music of the day. He knew every Bob Dylan lyrics.
He read every book that was out there. He thought
Henry David Throw and Rachel Carson were the great writers
(13:29):
for all time because of their belief in a simple,
natural lifestyle without pesticides. He had an organic garden when
nobody knew what an organic garden was. This was in
the fifties. Instead of writing, instead of driving his polluting
vehicle to school, he would ride a bicycle to his
(13:49):
job at the school and come back by bicycle. He
called the car the infernal combustion engine, not the internal
because the pollution. So he was so far ahead of
his time. He just lit a beacon that many, many
of us were fortunate enough to see where that light
(14:10):
was shining and to follow it with him. So I
have been eternally grateful at this lucky fortune that I
had to be his students in high school.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah, fortunate for you. He sounds like an amazing person.
And what about Bill Rogers? Bill Rogers was a peer?
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yes, yes, Bill Rogers and Jeff Galloway, I should say,
who was a great influence on American running. Bill and
Jeff and I were college classmates and cross country mates
at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, this small liberal arts
(14:50):
school that's mainly known for its devotion to the liberal arts.
I mean, we were a radical group of freethinking people
at Wesland, and for some strange reason, three of us
were particularly free thinking in the distance running department. Jeff
(15:10):
was a year or two older than I and on
campus when I was arrived, and Bill came on two
years later, and we just loved running and challenging ourselves.
And Jeff was very Jeff was very mild mannered, but
very disciplined and tough and strict when it came to
(15:33):
regular training, and all I had to do was fallen
behind him in the same way that I had fallen
in behind coach John Kelly in high school. And I
got a huge benefit from just following Jeff around for
a couple of years At Wesleyan. Bill came along several
years later, as I said, and he was not like
(15:55):
me and Jeff in the sense of being disciplined and
really determined and focused to become a great runner, not
at that point in his life, certainly later so Bill,
for example, we actually roomed together for a year or two,
and on Saturday nights he would disappear and go to
(16:16):
some rock and roll bars somewhere down the Turnpike and
dance and drink the night away with his former high
school buddies. And me, I was the guy who went
to bed at nine thirty every night so I could
get up the next morning at six thirty. And on
the weekends I was getting up at six thirty and
running twenty miles, which was not your normal college existence
(16:41):
back in the nineteen sixties nor now, I don't think.
But again, I was completely obsessed by the possibility that
I could become a successful athlete and running. Having given
up the basketball and baseball dreams, I had found my sport.
At that point, I was completely convinced that whoever trained
(17:04):
the hardest and the most would win the race. Not
a belief that I still hold, but I did hold
it then, and my thinking was very simple, if all
it takes is hard work, I'm going to work harder
and everybody else and see what I can win. And
it turned out to be a fairly successful formula.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah. Wow, I think you know somewhere there's got to
be someone that could write a movie about this. I
never really knew about all of these relationships. I want
to get some of your perspective on the marathon and
some of the marathon performances that we've seen as of late,
(17:51):
and particularly in the pro field. I mean, we had
Ilia Kipchogey put up some pretty stellar times in the
exhibition field running the sub two, and then you know,
we had Calvin kipt them come behind him and run
(18:13):
a couple of marathons faster than he'd ever run. And
you know, in the women's field, we've had some great
performances in the women's field. I'm just curious to get
your take on this. I mean, where do you think
the performance is coming from? And is it training? Is
(18:37):
it nutrition? Shoe technology? Is it wearable technology? Is a
combination of all of these elements? Where do you stand?
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Well? First of all, I'm not sure that any of
us can entirely understand or explain some of the amazing
performances that you've just to But I will get to
your direct question in a moment. But first I'm going
to tell you a story about Elliot Kipchoge that you
have not heard before. In about two thousand and five,
(19:13):
my wife and I and about a dozen other American
normal regular runner type folks went on a running tour
of Kenya. Were led by a fellow, an American who
had grown up in Kenya and in doing so learned
to love the culture, the people, the language and everything.
(19:36):
So he could speak Swahili and some of the dialects
so he could really dial us in to the running
scene in Kenya. And one afternoon he took us to
the training camp where there were about a dozen sponsored runners.
I think they were Nike sponsored runners even back then,
(19:58):
and again this is twenty years This was two thousand
and five or so, and we were going to go
on a run with the Kenyan runners, which sounds intimidating, right, Well,
it was intimidating. And what made it even a little
bit different was that my wife decided she wanted to
run with us that day. She's a runner, okay, she's
(20:19):
run a dozen marathons. She knows what she's doing, but
she wasn't in great shape. She wasn't training much. Then.
Of course, we're seven thousand feet in the Rift Valley
of Kenya, so she's not going to be able to run.
But let's say eleven minutes per mile, which doesn't sound
(20:39):
very much like a Kenyan pace. Nonetheless, I walked to
the front of the group and I raised my hand
and I say, I've got a question. Would any of
you guys be willing to run eleven minutes per mile
with us? Slow, slow, slow Americans? And Elliot Kipchoge steps
to the front of the circle and says, sure, I'll
(21:00):
run eleven minutes per mile with you guys, and he did,
and the three of us, my wife, me and Elliot
jogged down the road, watched the others disappear up in
front of us instantly, and ran our four miles at
eleven minutes per mile. So what's the point of the story?
Good question. I think Elliot Kipchogi simply has the best
(21:25):
mentality of any runner that we've ever known, and he
showed it that day in the fact that he realized
that running four miles super slow with a bunch of
a couple of slow Americans did not mean that he
was a lesser runner. It did not mean he was
going to get out of shape with one slow jog
(21:46):
that afternoon. It did not mean that just because his
other Kenyans took off down the road ahead of him,
that he couldn't run with them or faster any other day.
He just has it all together mentally. He understands what's
important and he doesn't waste energy on what's not important.
(22:06):
And of course that's a huge asset to any runner,
and I think Elliot has it in spades. He really
his mind is just it's a fool proof he's just
got it all.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
No, how are people running under two hours like Elliott
did in an exhibition race, And how are they doing
two oh two every weekend? Two hours and two minutes
and every marathon every weekend? Certainly we know two or
three minutes is coming from the shoes. I think we
all truly believe that now. When I grew up, we
(22:44):
absolutely every runner and every marathon tried to run in
the thinnest, lightest shoe they could possibly stand, because we
all knew that the way to be fast was to
have nothing on your feet, and the lightest shoes, which
were the closest to nothing, were the fastest shoes. Now
these guys are running in these big, foamy sandwich of
(23:07):
these shoes, which looked like they would be like running
on a pillow, where you would just collapse and get
no energy return at all. But instead the shoes are
cushiony and energy returning at the same time. It's just
a miracle of technology. I never thought i'd see it,
but I can't ignore what's in front of my face
(23:30):
and all of our faces now. And the funny thing is,
of course, that every self respecting marathon or even if
they're three hours or four hours or five hours, now
seems to feel that they need to buy a pair
of two hundred and fifty dollars super shoes, because you know,
it's like you're not a runner if you're running in
one of those lightweight, thin soled things. It's hard to believe.
(23:53):
We people were barefoot running fifteen years ago because they
thought that was the breakthrough, and now we've gone in
the other direction. The nutritional aspect is really interesting, but
it's so much harder to actually prove. But people are
certainly taking in a lot more carbohydrates as they run now,
(24:13):
and the gels. Instead of having you know, thirty grams
of carbohydrate on board, they've got forty or sixty, and
some of them more than that. And people are actually
doing this thing called gut training, which is training your
stomach to be able to tolerate a lot of gels,
which are essentially sugar, to tolerate that in the stomach
(24:37):
without getting you know, nausea and worse from too much sugar.
I don't know how people are doing it, but they are,
and you know, and we go from there to things
like sodium bicarbonate and vasodilators, beetroot juice, people trying everything,
(25:01):
and for some people it seems that it's working, or
people have just placeboed themselves into believing that if you
take six different nutritional supplements you'll run better six different ways.
And as I said, we don't know, but there's no
denying how fast people are going these days. It's quite remarkable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, and you so you ran in nineteen sixty eight,
two twenty two seventeen was your time to win the
Boston Marathon, and you pr two fourteen twenty eight that
year as well. Would you ever conceive that there would
(25:46):
be a woman under two ten? Ruth kepn Gedich ran
under to ten at Chicago. I talked to I mean,
you probably familiar with Andrew Jones, had a conversation with him.
Also thinks that a couple of minutes are coming from
the shoes. And then obviously the East African runners have
(26:07):
continually just gotten better. They've always outperformed. They seem like
they're getting better. Perhaps money's a powerful motivator. It's just
hard to figure out how human performance could improve that much.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Yes, I've had a very hard time figuring out how
human performance could improve that much. Tony, and I want
to say that I'm a huge fan of and proponent
of women's running. I'm a huge believer in the East
African runners, but I'm a little bit skeptical, unfortunately, of
(26:48):
the Ruth Chepngettitch's two nine at Chicago. When I look
at the performance what I see was that she was
a consistent TOWO fourteen or two fifteen, theen runner. A
few years earlier. She seemed to be slowing down a
little bit in her career, which happens to everybody at
(27:09):
some point, and then totally out of nowhere, she produces
this startling performance which nobody has come close to in
the last six months. Of course, it's going to take
a lot more months than six to really see if
other women can get down there. I am skeptical of
(27:29):
that performance. We do know that there has been unfortunately
too much doping going on in Kenya in recent years.
I had no suspicions whatsoever of the great Kenyan runners
for decades and decades before the current epoch. Now I
have to say I have some suspicions. Some of them
(27:52):
have performance arcs which just don't look natural to me,
and I have no whatsoever. I'd be the first to
admit it. It's possible that Ruth Chapping gettit's just had
faster Nike shoes than anybody else ever did, or that
she he's an extremely positive responder to super shoes. Some
(28:16):
people get a big boost from super shoes. Some people
actually run slower in super shoes. It's completely individual, and
we don't know anything about Ruth chappingingetits and her shoes
and how she ran two a nine last fall in Chicago.
But it blew my mind, and not in a good way.
(28:38):
And that's more than enough set about that.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
We'll see what happens, I think, But I think getting
that perspective from you is very interesting. What about wearable tech?
Wearable technology? AI? Do you see that that is a
big influence.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Well, there's certainly no denying that we're surrounded by wearable tech,
including things that I'm sure I'm not even aware of.
I did not have a GPS watch myself until about
two months ago, and I'll be damned if I've figured
out how to use the thing yet. Just getting it
(29:22):
to start when I start my run seems to be
a challenge, and I certainly don't have any other tech
other than And this came as a surprise to me.
I never listened to music when I ran because I'm
just that much of not that much of a music
head like everybody else, and I wanted to focus on
(29:44):
my run. But I have become a big consumer of podcasts.
When I go out and run now, and you know,
I'm seventy eight years old. I don't run nearly as
fast as I used to. I'm just trying to stay
out there and stay comfortable and stay fit. And I
find that I really enjoyed listening to podcasts while I'm running.
(30:08):
So that's that's my favorite piece of performance. Performance tech
in general, I don't see that performance tech can possibly
do too much beyond the accumulated wisdom, the accumulated training,
the accumulated trial and error experiments of all the runners
(30:30):
who have come before today. I mean, people have run
two hundred miles a week, people have done hill training,
people have had blood testing to see what their iron
stores and carbohydrates are. You know, people have done all
of these things. It's much easier and quicker and less
intrusive to do them now. But I'm not sure how
(30:53):
much performance is really gaining from it. It's just it's fun.
It's fun to wonder about. Of course, we all, you know,
we all got interested in our heart rate at a
certain point because we could get our heart rate by
simply feeling our wrists or neck or wherever for a pulse.
And I did that for a while, but after a
(31:14):
while as you the more experienced the runner you are,
the less you tend to rely on all of the gizmos,
and the more you learn to rely on how you
feel today. Do you feel good today, then go for it.
Do you feel not so good today, then maybe you
need a recovery day or two before you do your
(31:35):
next hard one.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah. We had John Career and the Boston Marathon. Just
won the Boston Marathon and he I think they interviewed him.
He said that he's looking to target two one for
the remainder of the year. So and I think that
this is just incredible. I mean, now if somebody runs too,
(31:58):
I think ran two a five something around two five
in London, and they're looking at him as he didn't
have a good race, right, It's like, now you've got
to go under two h five to be perceived to
have a good race.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
So well, yeah, and you and you know John Career
should be targeting two a one because he's at the
cusp of it now and everyone at the elite level.
You get to a certain point and you know if
you don't want to slow down, you want to keep
getting faster. But you know, the when it comes to
training a couple of things we know are if you
(32:34):
train more, you'll get better, and if you train more.
If you train more again, you'll get better. And if
you train more again, you'll get injured. If you train faster,
you'll get better. If you train faster again, you'll get better,
And if you train faster again, you'll get injured. So
there's only so much the human body can take before
it makes you back down and try again and perhaps
(32:58):
be a little bit smarter the second time around.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, okay, we'll see what I see what happens. It
won't be long before we'll be talking about another outstanding
performance and maybe someone will go under under two in
a in an open event, a regulation open event. So
(33:21):
let's let's bring it down to the amateur level, right,
And so you talked a little bit about, you know,
some of the factors contributing to performance. Right. So Boston
Marathon is getting really popular, more popular than it ever
has been. And I think that you know, some of
this has been fueled by this concept of the majors, right,
(33:43):
the majors and you know, amateur runners. Last time I
looked at the numbers, somewhere around a few million people
are finishing marathons and half marathons around the globe on
a yearly basis, So a lot of people are getting
into marathon and so it's fueling a lot of these
(34:05):
conversations about performance and on social media, everyone wants to
talk about, oh, you should do this type of training
that type of training, low volume, high volume, zone two threshold.
So where do you stand on this for the average person.
If you were to give advice to the amateur marathon
(34:28):
or looking to cultivate their training, how would you describe?
You know, well, do you have any particular mantras like
volume is king?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, that's a great question, Tony, in one that everybody
is asking because, as you have noted, marathoning and half
marathoning has seems to have reached a popularity peak. Now,
we had the COVID pandemic, which was a major blow
to racing. You just couldn't go and run with people
at racis. We all remember some of those post COVID
(35:03):
races and how weird they were what we had to
go through with the start and finishing in between. But
now we're past that, thank goodness. And somehow during COVID
more people than previously got the message that running was
a little solitary sport. You could go out and do
(35:23):
it by yourself. You wouldn't infect anyone or get infected
if you were out there doing it solitary. It was
better than staying in the house all damn day long.
You couldn't go to the gym, etc. Etc. More people
seem to come up with an understanding of running, and
once you start it, if you have a little bit
(35:45):
of luck and improvement, of course, there's a big flashing
light in front of you that says, qualify for the
Boston Marathon. Qualify for the Boston Marathon. And I think
that and other similar races were which these days you
almost have to qualify for everything. Races are so popular
(36:05):
and so hard to get into. So everybody wants to
get a little bit faster, of course, and hit a
BQ or sub three hours or sub four whatever their
goal is. And the goals, of course, are all over
the place. Because some of the people are just out
(36:27):
of college. They're twenty, they're young, strong with incredibly elastic tendons,
with long strides, and they can fly when they run.
And some of them are midlife women whose kids have
finally gone off to college. So they got a little
bit more time on their hands, and they'd like to
train and have a goal because women are incredibly disciplined
(36:49):
and consistent and successful at running. And then some of
us are seventy eight as I am, and we have
no elasticity left in our legs, and my stride is
about one point seven inches long if I even actually
managed to get my lead foot off the ground. So
(37:10):
we're all coming at it in a different place. And
my advice to people the simple approach is basically, you know,
if you can run a few more miles per week
and you can do it healthier, you're going to get faster.
And if you get a little bit faster, you should
probably try to add a few more miles after that.
(37:33):
Because for most of us, I don't want to say
mileager volume is king, but easy running is the best
and safest way to improve your time. If you need
something more dramatic, then of course you've got to do
the occasional slightly faster training pace. And I think tempo
(37:58):
or lactate threshold training pace is a good effort about
your half marathon speed because it's up tempo, but it's
not destructive, it doesn't tear down your muscles and joints
and everything. And of course, if you want to break
four minutes in the mile and qualify for the US
(38:20):
Olympic team, then you got to get on the track
and go back to running those damnable ten four hundred
meters and under sixty seconds or whatever I mean. These days,
they probably do them in fifty six seconds. So you
pick your goal and you adjust your training from there.
(38:40):
Most runners are midlife runners, which is to say they've
got a family, a job, a community, volunteer work, and
that just doesn't leave them time to run one hundred
miles a week. So one hundred is for the professionals,
and anything else is for people to decide how it
(39:03):
fits into their life in the best way possible for
both health and fitness. And finally, my big message from
where I am in life these days is that every
mile that you run today, no matter what age you're at,
should be a You should be able, You should be
(39:25):
looking forward to that point when you're my age, and
how is today's mile going to keep me running healthy
and motivated and happy and joyfully when I'm fifty or
sixty or seventy. And that is the big goal, because
I am slower than I've ever been at any time
(39:47):
in my life, and tomorrow I'll be slower than I
am today. But running is out some are more important
to me than it has ever been at any other time,
because I'm surrounded by people my age who are not
as healthy and fit as I am, unfortunately, and their
lives do not look very appealing to me, with the
(40:08):
right wheelchairs and the halting walks and the inability to
climb a flight of stairs, never mind, go on a
cool adventure vacation and climb the Pyramids and Mexico, as
I've done a few times and enjoyed. So train for
train for when you're seventy five. Train smart today so
(40:30):
that you'll still be doing it when you're seventy five.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah, yeah, On on what you mentioned about, you know,
Boston and qualifying, So it's getting harder to get into
Boston Marathon. And I think now, if you're a mail
in your twenties or thirties, you need to run sub three,
which is unbelievable, I mean, but that's what you have
(40:54):
to do if you're a male in your twenties or thirties,
And then you know the women's times are about thirty
thirty minutes slower than that.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Well, first of all, I agree with you entirely. It's
extremely difficult to qualify for the Boston Marathon. What is it,
ten or twelve percent of the population only is fast
enough to qualify at each age group. So if you
are not capable of qualifying, you're in very good company.
(41:26):
There are a lot of people with you. And secondly,
while running the Boston Marathon is a fantastic thing, it
is not a major measure of life, happiness and success.
And if you can't qualify for the Boston Marathon, there
(41:47):
are still plenty of other marathons around the world in
fantastic locations which will take you if you get entered
kind of early. And there are certainly many many other
races at other distances that you can participate in and
challenge yourself with. And to repeat what I'm going to
(42:09):
keep repeating, qualifying for the Boston Marathon isn't quite as
important as being able to run healthy when you're seventy five,
And I would really really tell people that that's what
should be a focus of your running. How are you
going to organize your life and your fitness and your
(42:30):
family so that you can still run when you're seventy five,
and heck, it's even a little bit easier to win
age group awards when you're seventy five. So there's a
reward out there. You just got to keep going for it.
And of course the bigger reward is being healthy and
hale and hardy and active and energetic and feeling good
(42:52):
about life at a time when frankly, a lot of
people don't feel good about life because of seventy five.
You can see the downslope ahead and that that's a
challenging mental situation for many people. But if you're still
active and healthy, you've got some good tools to fight
it with.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, now I talk about that. So there's a lot
of you know, former elite runners that are coming back.
You see Joan Joan Benoit, she comes back and run
a couple of times, run a couple of marathons. Paula
Radcliffe is jumping back in, and we even see you know, MEB,
(43:37):
MEB jumping back in and doing and they're all doing it,
you know, sort of recreationally. How did you know? So
you've been running what over fifty years? Correct?
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I think over sixty at this twenty years.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah, and so at your at your peak, you probably
were running one hundred and hundred over one hundred and
twenty miles a week.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
I ran at my peak for oh for almost a decade.
I was at one hundred miles a week or over,
and I decided to change that almost overnight, and I
switched in nineteen seventy six. So that was almost what
fifty years ago, and I've been running twenty five or
(44:22):
thirty miles a week since, and I'm absolutely steady and consistent.
I still love running, I love other activities. I go
to the gym as skinny and weak as I am,
which is not a good thing. I do lift weights
for twenty or thirty minutes a week. You wouldn't know
it to look at me, or the very modest weights
(44:45):
that I'm lifting, often just my body weight. But I'm
doing that too, and I'm just enjoying the fact that
I can still do these things, and I want to
be able to keep doing them as long as I
possibly can. So you run the miles and the speed
that you can at a particular time of life, and
you realize that there are periods of life when you
(45:09):
can't do too much, but there will be periods of
life even later maybe retirement, which is a great thing
if you have a good retirement, there will be periods
when you can do more. And you definitely want to
be fit and healthy enough in retirement to start having
some real fun with the adventure runs and races and
(45:33):
travel that you can put together.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, and that's really the key. I think some of
the challenges that endurance athletes have is trying to moderate
your running as you get older, and then people end
up either mentally burning out physically burning out after they
(45:56):
realize the prs are in the rear view mirror now,
and so some of that is definitely hard to deal with.
And so I think you know, some of the elite
runners that are coming back and running and showing everyone
that you can still do this recreationally and still have
fun and still enjoy it. It's very important.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
I think you've hit on a very key and important
point there, Tony. You're right. A lot of people I
know get to the point where they can no longer
break three hours. Let's say, because I've known a lot
of good runners in my day, and when they can't
break three hours, they're like, what's the point, And maybe
they just quit running all together. And that's absolutely a
(46:43):
terrible mistake to make. And some of them come back
twenty years later, fortunately, and slowly work themselves into shape.
But the real problem is mid life in America for
many many people means less activity and more weight. And
(47:06):
you know, if you gain one or two pounds per year,
which is the average, doesn't sound like much after two
or three years, But if you add it up after
twenty or thirty years, two or three decades, suddenly you're
forty or fifty pounds heavier than you were when you
were thirty or forty. You haven't exercised in a long time,
(47:28):
and that's a real recipe for disaster, and it's also
a huge impediment to starting to get fit again. I mean,
it's really hard to exercise when you're fifty pounds overweight.
I don't blame anyone for having difficulty with that. It's
just extraordinarily hard. So I tell people, if at all possible,
(47:53):
keep moving whatever you can and try really hard not
to gain those mid life pounds because they will. They
will get after you when you turn sixty or seventy,
and you won't be appreciating them at all.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Those are some wise words for sure. Okay, so now
how can people see some of your articles? Are? Are
you still writing for Runners World?
Speaker 3 (48:23):
I'm now writing for an interesting outfit called Marathonhandbook dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
They can be found very easily with that name Marathon
Handbook on the web. They've got a huge readership despite
the fact that they're not very well known. They're an
interesting group of people from Spain and Toronto and Costa
Rica and a few other places that have just kind
(48:52):
of bended together with passion and some good editorial quality
to do a very very deep website which is all
about marathon and endurance performance for the most part.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah, okay, we'll look for you there, and then your
own website we can find you at. Is is it
a nbe birfoot dot com?
Speaker 3 (49:19):
It is that there's not a whole lot of information there,
but it does point. It does point in different directions,
and I'm not difficult to find. I'm not trying to
hide from anybody like everybody else.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
I'm not a.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
Massive social media influencer, so I don't have to hide
and duck away. So people can find me if they're interested,
and I'm always happy to talk running with people who
are interested in making it a key part of their life.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
And of course we can run into you at some
start lines. You're still running, right, You're still running Boston
Marathon when you can, when you.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Can Boston Marathon. I've run more times in the last
decade than any other time in my life. And I
have a Thanksgiving Day race that I've now run sixty
two years in a row, which I think is a
world record for consecutive race finishes. Fortunately it's only a
five miler, but I can tell you it's challenging to
(50:20):
run the same race on the same day for sixty
two years in a row, because life does have surprises
for all of us, and some of those surprises are
not very pleasant and you really have to battle to
get past them.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Wow. Incredible sixty two years.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
So that's more than Johnny A. Kelly ran the Boston Marathon.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Johnny A. Kelly is old. John is everybody's hero in
lifetime running pursuit as I am. He had the misfortune
actually of starting a little bit later in life than
I did, so starting early helps you out. And of
course he was running the marathon every year rather than
my puny little five miler, so's he's my hero forever.
(51:09):
I'm not trying to outdo him. I'm simply trying to
set my own path.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah wow, Well thanks for that and thanks for your time.
You've got some very interesting takes from you. So I
think in a year from now, if I have run
into you, you know, we'll be talking about some of
the the performances that have surpassed the performances of today.
(51:35):
So we'll i interested to have you back when we can.
So thanks again for.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Your time, Tony, thank you so much. There's no doubt
people are going to continue running farther and faster than
we've ever seen, and so we'll be back to talking
about it again another day.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
Thanks again to the legend Andy burr Foot. In the
show notes, you can find links to ambiburfoot dot com
as well as Marathonhandbook dot com. Definitely interesting hearing some
of his takes on recent pro marathon performance, as well
as his advice for amateur runners on running with efficiency,
(52:24):
running for performance, and running for longevity. Most of all,
and running is more popular than ever. Over a million
people in the London Marathon lottery, over a million people worldwide.
(52:44):
It's very very interesting news and positive news for the
sport of running. So hopefully all the new runners and
the veterans got something out of this podcast with Amby
and Hey. After your listen to this, go out and
get a few miles in. It's good to be back
(53:05):
behind the mic after taking some time off during our
busier time of the year in April. Have some fascinating
guests coming up on the Endurance Experience, Science and evidence
based podcast on endurance sports, so stay tuned to the
(53:27):
podcast and hopefully you'll give us your ear in the
sea of podcasts that are out there now. Thank you
for your time.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Follow event Horizon Endurance Sport on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and
x for training and nutrition programs and on demand learning.
To become a member of our Endurance Institute, or for
complete archives of podcasts, blog on to our website Event
(54:03):
Horizon dot tv.
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