The other day I derided wrote about the Crossfit program that Brian Mackenzie is deluded into believing convinced will revolutionize training for distance runners. At the time, the full article in the June issue of Competitor was not available online, but it is now, in Competitor’s nifty digital format.

A couple of notes. One, Richard Gibbens (not Gibbons) is incorrectly identified in the article as an exercise scientist. He has a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, but that doesn’t make him a scientist, and this would hold true even if he were a bastion of sound analysis instead of a fifth-degree crank. If he’s an exercise scientist, then I’m a physicist, and anyone with a B.A. in psychology is a psychologist, and wouldn’t that be a colossal mess.

Two, and more importantly, it’s become clear to me that all of these guys pushing low-volume, high-intensity training for distance runners because they themselves became injured or otherwise wiped out by high-volume training have no idea how to train properly using high mileage. Mackenzie is very clearly an intense guy, as is Gibbens, a former Green Beret. I have no doubt that whatever mileage totals they reached in their previous lives included far too much work at the high end of the aerobic spectrum, and that they had no concept of how to properly execute recovery days. Had they gone about things the tried and true way, and maybe tried running more on grass and dirt and less on pavement, and learned that hammering away all the time is a bad idea, then they surely could have thrived on a greater overall workload. This is admittedly just a guess, but it’s not a blind one — I’ve seen their Type-A ilk in action and their ability to survive sane marathon training is limited by their personality traits unless they submit to being reined in regularly by a second set of eyes.

I admit that I only found this captivatingly inane treatise on the evils of “jogging” because I decided to choose the title “How Jogging Can Be Bad For You” from the LIVESTRONG pile just to practice writing from the standpoint of borderline intellectual dishonesty. (People on debate squads apparently engage in similar endeavors routinely.) For all I know, the “author,” Jonathan Wong, was doing the same thing when he wrote the piece, in which he gives three basic reasons that jogging “does people no good”: It doesn’t help you look good, doesn’t help you in the “game” of life, and isn’t that great for your health. Reading only these three section headings is enough to assure anyone not in the throes of heavy-metal poisoning, an ether binge or organic mental compromise that the “writer” is either piss-ignorant or gleefully dishonest. Given his lack of command of English (note that he manages to misuse both “it’s” and “its,” which is pathognomonic for spurious content), I reckon he’s just a twit.

Some excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was sitting in the waiting room at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine waiting to meet with one of the exercise physiologists on staff to gather information for an article I’m writing for Competitor Online about high-altitude endurance training. There was a print copy of the June issue handy, so I grabbed it and was immediately struck by the cover, which features the words “Run Less, Get Strong, Go Faster” alongside a photo of a grave-looking, heavily muscled guy who was apparently the mind behind this breakthrough. No longer quite as anxious to get into the performance lab, I flipped to the story, knowing I was about to be walloped with a load of bunk but curious as to whether it would be novel bunk. It wasn’t, but it pushed the limits of credulity all the same, at least as much on account of what it didn’t say as what it did. Read the rest of this entry »