Thoughts About Running

By Andrew McKay Finding Balance Between Tech and Feel

On November 20, 2016, disaster struck at the Philadelphia Marathon. It wasn’t the 2 C temperature, or the 48–54 kph winds so strong they forced organizers to remove the start line structure. No, it was much worse: at 17k, my iPod stopped working. Long runs and recovery days. Intervals and rest. High-mileage weeks and easy runs. Training is all about balance, unless we’re talking about technology. Then, it seems, there’s no such thing as too much: online coaching, workout and mileage trackers, gps watches that play music, time your intervals and let you read your e-mails, all at the same time. I mean, if it’s not on Strava, did it even happen?

It’s not like all the tools are placebos, either. A 2017 study in the International Journal of Physiology, Pathophysiology and Pharmacology examined athletes to see how long they could exercise with and without musical accompaniment. The study found “total exercise duration in whole group with music was significantly greater than exercise duration without music.”

So when my iPod crashed in Philadelphia, I might have felt doomed. Another 25k in the wind and cold, with nothing to guide me but my laboured breathing? I’d never run that far undistracted. Instead, I focused on my surroundings and my pace – and realized I was actually speeding up. I f inished with a PB of almost f ive minutes and qualif ied for the 2018 Boston Marathon.

At Boston in 2018, I hit another speed bump. My touchscreen gps watch was no match for the rain and wind of that year’s torrential storm; within the first 5k, my watch’s data fields had reset, and my frozen, wrinkled fingers couldn’t readjust any of the settings. So I ran my first Boston Marathon with no idea how fast I was going. But trusting my training and muscle memory, I finished almost on target: less than four minutes off my PB.

Nowhere has technology become more pervasive than in the world of coaching. Online resources mean any runner can find a top-of-the-line coach, no matter where they live. That was my case in 2016 when Canadian marathoning star Rob Watson started coaching me. We’d met at the 2015 Pan Am Games, and my wife signed me up for an early cohort of Mile2Marathon as I embarked on my BQ chase. I learned a lot from Rob’s workouts, and our Skype chats, but I also missed the in-person feedback. Running workouts on my own got lonely.

“When you are with an athlete in person, it’s nice to be able to give real-time feedback and tweaks, but online you obviously can’t do that,” Watson said recently. “Make a choice that works the best to what kind of athlete you are, and the options you have both locally and online.”

“Ideally, you can combine the two, kind of like how we do things here in Vancouver. I have both an online and ‘ boots on ground’ relationship with many athletes and it is awesome.”

Last January, I got to jump into an M2M workout in Vancouver, and was inspired by the group Rob Watson and Dylan Wykes have built . I’ve returned to the group I was working with before – the Lower East Siders, in Toronto’s east end. I’ve moved 45 minutes away, but Seanna Robinson coaches me online, and I can still go to team parties or jump into a workout now and then. My PB has dropped by 10 minutes, and I’m looking forward to running Boston again next year with our crew.

There’s a difference between embracing technology as a tool, and using it as a crutch. I dumped the touchscreen, and often run without looking at my watch. I can run without music – but prefer podcasts these days. I rarely figure out where I’m going before I leave the house. I load my training plan in a Google Sheet, but I don’t check it obsessively.

I still freak out when Strava’s down, though.