Book review: Running Tough

Most of us have a few favourite runs that we like to repeat. Sometimes it is a favourite route. Sometimes it’s a particular interval session that tells you what kind of shape you are in.

Running Tough is a collection of 63 favourite sessions from some of the world’s best runners and coaches.

The author, Michael Sandrock, is a runner and writer from Boulder, Colorado. Attracted by the scenery and altitude, elite runners have based themselves in Boulder for many years. The majority of the featured runners are either permanent or temporary residents of Boulder, including stars like Paula Radcliffe, Frank Shorter, and Steve Jones. There are also a few all time greats such as Emil Zatopek, Peter Snell and Kip Keino.

Some of the sessions sound like fun: one coach recommends racing in teams of two, with one team member running while the other recovers on a bike. Others sound brutal: 2:09 marathoner Benji Durden liked to do a 5 mile warm up ending at a track where he ran a 10km interval session (in 29 minutes). He carried straight on with a 15 minute run to a 5 mile course, covered in 25 minutes, before a 3 mile warm down.

Not many would copy Zatopek’s featured workout, 100 x 400m, but Sandrock tells the story of one who did. While running for the University of Oregon, Damien Koch piled 80 pebbles on the track and used them to count off 80 400m repetitions, which he ran in 72 seconds each. He never got to test the benefit of his hard work - within three weeks he was injured.

The inclusion of this warning is typical of the book. Despite the title, there is nothing macho about it. Sandrock’s message is to manage your training to achieve consistency: “There are no instant results in running and seeking them typically leads to disaster. Better to look for far-off improvement”. He describes how Rob De Castella only ran 8 x 400m on the track but did it every week for 14 years. Although Frank Shorter took a year to build up to a 20 mile long run, he then did it every Sunday for ten years.

The book contains training schedules, which include some of the featured sessions. There is also plenty of advice on how to modify the sessions to your own abilities. However the quotes and anecdotes which the book is packed with make it a much better read than any conventional training manual.

Craig Masback shows that even 3:52 milers aren’t immune from being humbled on the training track. Running an interval session with Steve Ovett during a visit to Brighton, they ran together until the last repetition. As Ovett passed him, Masback saw, while struggling even to cross the line, “the whole difference between us”. Frank Shorter describes how he liked to pace his interval sessions so that after the last one “if someone put a gun to my head and said ‘Do another one’, I’d say ‘Shoot me’”.

There is no magic training session that will make you faster on its own. But that isn’t the point of the book. Trying some of the runs is a fun way to introduce some new ideas into your training and, as Sandrock says, “Each of us runs alone in the end, yet also in the footsteps of all the runners who have preceded us through the years”.