On a spring morning 37 years ago, I joined a handful of runners at the Stanford track for a jaunt in the hills. The group included Peter Wood, M.D., a well-known researcher on fitness and heart disease at Stanford Medical School, and Joe Henderson, founding editor of Runner’s World. I felt happy to be with these “running elders,” and I was eager to listen and learn.
There was a young man in our group whose college track coach was Laszlo Tabori, a Hungarian runner who placed fourth in the 1500m and sixth in the 5000m at the 1956 Olympics. Tabori was a zealous devotee of interval training. The young runner laughed as he recalled how he would collapse on his bed after the day’s hard interval session, too exhausted to think about doing schoolwork. His best races came after he left Tabori and began giving his body enough rest.
Interval training is supported by a large body of research. It has helped countless runners tune their bodies for fast racing. But, like any training method, it needs to be applied with caution. And, too often, “caution” is the last word we runners want to hear.
We pounce on new methods that promise rapid results. “If interval training will make me fast, and more intervals will make me faster – bring ’em on!”
It’s logical: more is better. But, of course, how logical is that, really? It’s logic that’s divorced from reality – it’s abstract reasoning that hops blithely over contradicting realities. It isn’t calm, objective reasoning at all; it’s reason gone mad, logic being led around on a leash by personal feeling.
The unspoken sub-text is likely to be: “I want desperately to be fast, to be exceptional, to shine before my peers – and I’ll do anything to get there.” But reason that doesn’t include a calm, mature acceptance of reality has a way of leading us into a ditch.
Athletes are notorious for cloaking their inner desires in noble-sounding words. We don’t want to be wimps. We want to be rugged. We want to work hard. We want to accomplish. We want to do our best. We want to be heroic. We want to reap the rewards that come by daring greatly.
We’re seldom eager to hear: “Intervals are good within reason, in the right number, at the appropriate time. After building a base of slow, aerobic running, intervals applied wisely can bring out the last measure of your speed.”
Scratching out a training plan that’s based on abstract numbers is a good first step, but it should be a highly tentative one. Arriving at the track for a session of speedwork, our bodies may, in fact, be sending us messages that contradict our plans: “I need to do this workout carefully, while monitoring my intuitive sense of my body’s needs. When I exceed my body’s abilities, my heart feels restless, shaky, bruised and abused. But when I harmonize my heart’s feelings before doing any fast running, my calm feeling, balanced by calm reason and experience, tells me how many intervals I can safely do, and how fast I should do them. I come out of those runs feeling positive, energized, and healthy.”
Training is an endless quest for balance, where the pure logic of theory is continually adjusted to the reality of our daily, individual needs. Pure logic is reliable on the plane of pure abstraction. But calm, intuitive feeling tells us what we can get away with in the real world, with its ever-changing ebb and flow. Intuitive feeling doesn’t replace logic; it’s reason’s indispensable partner.
How does intuition work? The voice that nature uses to tell us what will bring us the greatest health and happiness is the intuitive heart, partnered with calm, dispassionate reason. If we’re unable to hear the heart’s messages, it may be because, in our culture, we’ve chosen to emphasize reason and logic too exclusively, and we’ve driven feeling out of the picture. We tend to dismiss feeling as imprecise and “unscientific.” As a result, we fail to realize that reason is more reliable when it”s balanced by the heart.
I’d like to share a passage from Laurens van der Post’s wonderful book, Lost World of the Kalahari. I’m including it because it gives the flavor of intuition as it’s experienced by people whose lives are untouched by the western obsession with logic. As the story begins, the author is returning with a group of Bushmen after a long day’s hunt.
But this was not yet the end of a wonderful day. Something very remarkable happened on the way back. We drove home slowly, for the going was rough and our Land-Rovers deeply loaded with meat. The sun was down and the sky before us so red that Ben exclaimed in Afrikaans, “Dear Lord, isn’t that a perfect sunset to end a hunter’s day? It looks really as if the Master Hunter up there, die ou Baas Jagter daar ho, has just killed his eland too.”
Struck by this glimpse of the poet in Ben, which was rarely exposed, I was about to answer when he went on, “You know, I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our jails because he killed a giant bustard which, according to the police, was a crime since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut in and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari! Physically, the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died nonetheless!”
We were silent for a while, and then trying to break out of the gloom I said, “I wonder what they’ll say at the sip-wells when they learn that we’ve killed an eland?”
“Excuse me, Master,” Dabe said, bolder than I had ever known him, “they already know.”
“What on earth do you mean?” I asked.
“They know by wire,” he declared, the English word wire on his Bushman tongue making me start with its unexpectedness.
“Wire?” I exclaimed.
“Yes. A wire, Master. I have seen my own master go many times to the D.C. at Gemsbok Pan and get him to send a wire to the buyers telling them when he is going to trek out to them with his cattle. We Bushman have a wire here,” he tapped his chest, “that brings us news.”
More than that I couldn’t get out of him, but even before we were home it was clear that our skeptical minds were about to be humbled. From afar in the dark, long before our fires were visible from a place where we stopped to adjust our heavy load, the black silence was broken by a glitter of new song from the women.
“Do you hear that, oh, my Master?” Dabe said, whistling between his teeth. “Do you hear? They’re singing ‘The Eland Song.’”
Whether by “wire,” or by what mysterious means, they did know at the sip-wells, and were preparing to give their hunters the greatest of welcomes. By that time we ourselves were so identified in deed as well as mind with our hosts that, despite the vast differences of upbringing and culture, their exalted mood also became our own.1
1 The Lost World of the Kalahari. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1958. 255-261.
