Eat and Run Read online

  Coach Sorenson told us stories about how he and his brother would go up to the Arctic Circle and fish from canoes for weeks. He also told stories of chasing deer on foot until they (the deer) collapsed from exhaustion. Coach Sorenson was one of the only people I had ever met who asked why as relentlessly as I had and then explained the answers. Why alternate sprints with distance training? Why move your arms one way and not another? Why lag back rather than take the lead early? Coach was usually asking the questions and providing the answers, but if one of us asked something he didn’t know, he seemed even happier. Knowing pleased him not nearly as much as wondering. Finally, a place where—and a man who—I could ask why.

  To call our team motley would have been a lavish compliment. Duluth had three school districts. There were the cake eaters on the East Side, and in the middle were the greasers, the city kids, the ones who hung out on street corners and who we were sure carried switchblades and pulled stickups. Then there was us, the poor kids, so far out of town that we weren’t even technically part of the Duluth school district. The tough redneck kids.

  There was Jon Obrecht, whose parents thought sports built character, and the Szybnski brothers, Mark and Matt, who were both around 6-foot, 225. They wore tights and long baggy shorts over them. They looked like a cross between linebackers and ballerinas. And there was lanky me. Before Coach Sorenson, not one of us had ever been on cross-country skis before.

  We might not have been as experienced as the other teams, and we definitely weren’t as well equipped, but we were focused. Coach had only three commandments: Be in shape. Work hard. Have fun. They were the perfect fundamentals for a bunch of poor redneck Minnesotans. His motto was, “Pain only hurts.”

  Other teams had bigger squads and nicer uniforms, but we’d show up in our blue jeans and flannel shirts, and by the time I was a junior we’d kick their asses. Or at least some of their asses. The cake eaters at Duluth East were in a different class than everyone else. They wore red Lycra uniforms, and each one of them carried two or three pairs of skis. They were our version of the Evil Empire, or the New York Yankees, or whatever group was rich and powerful and had everything they ever wanted but wanted more. They showed up at meets in privately hired buses. Of course we hated them.

  I was probably the best skier on our team then, and a lot of it was because of all the endurance and fitness base I had built up running. We did interval training on the skis—racing up hills—and Coach Sorenson told me it was the first time anyone younger than him had ever beaten him. He seemed happy about it.

  It wasn’t just our team that was winning. I started collecting individual prizes that season. My parents would come to the meets, and because they took place in the woods, my dad built a sled. He’d put my mom in it and wrap her up in a sleeping bag and put big mittens on her hands, and he’d pull her so she could watch me. That felt good.

  I was ranked fifteenth best cross-country skier in the state, and my dad had found steady work as a boiler operator at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. Even though my mom needed a wheelchair now, and even though I still had to stack wood and do the laundry and cook and clean, I had learned that if sometimes you just do things, well, sometimes things worked out.

  The trouble was, sometimes they didn’t. One day in March, I drove my brother and sister over to our great-grandmother’s to take her out for lunch and shopping. When we got home, my mom was lying on the floor. She had fallen when she was trying to get up from the toilet, and she had broken her hip. We called my dad, and we called for an ambulance. My mom never walked after that. My dad changed, too. First he gave us—especially me—hell. He said he counted on me to take care of things at home when he was working and I had let him down. I tried to explain that Mom had insisted we go to Grandma’s. She said she’d be fine. But he was not having any part of it. He was pissed.

  Soon, a new physical therapist came to help my mom; the help she needed now was much more intensive. His name was Steve Carlin, and twice a week he worked with my mom on some pretty involved exercises. He saw me watching them, and one day he said, “Hey, you’re an athlete, you can help out here, you’d be good at this.” That’s when I first thought of being a physical therapist instead of a game warden. So I started being Mom’s physical therapist, too. I’d always felt close to her, ever since the days she had pulled my hands around the cookie bowl, and I think my helping meant a lot to her. My brother hated how things were at home, and he spent all his time skiing and causing trouble with his little buddies. Those were his ways of escaping. My sister kept her head down. My dad withdrew.

  That summer I was nominated to go to the Team Birkie ski camp for the best high school cross-country skiers in the state. It was held in Cable, Wisconsin, at Telemark Lodge, and all the skiers stayed in a youth hostel in the woods. There were kids from all over the Midwest and coaches from all over, too. The three-time Olympic medalist Nikolai Anikin and his wife, Antonina, were our guest coaches. Antonina spoke almost no English and communicated in yips and yells. She said things with this great accent, like “ski valking” instead of “ski walking,” like Drago from Rocky IV. We imitated that stuff, and I tried to soak up every Russian-sounding word.

  I learned about VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen we can use for aerobic respiration. I learned about different kinds of waxing and finishing kicks and plyometric strength training and lactate threshold, the point at which our muscles accumulate lactic acid faster than they can clear it. I learned about pacing and how to wear a heart rate monitor to measure how hard I was working. We watched videos of the Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns who were the best skiers in the world, and I was amazed. It was like finding the best book in the world on cross-country skiing.

  As much as I focused and listened to the instructors, I think I might have learned even more at mealtime. The camp served vegetable lasagna, all kinds of salads, and freshly baked whole wheat bread. At the time, anything more than iceberg lettuce with some cucumbers and creamy ranch dressing seemed bold to me, if not amazingly sophisticated. Whole wheat anything and cooked spinach? That was flat-out exotic.

  I didn’t have any choice, so I ate it all. And I couldn’t believe how good it tasted! What was even more amazing was how great I felt. I trained more, and more often, at that camp than I ever had before. And I had never felt better, stronger. I suspected that what I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling, but it wasn’t until years later, when I began to study the connection between diet and exercise, nutrition and health, that I learned the importance of diet for everyone—not just athletes.

  I would learn that a plant-based diet meant more fiber, which sped food through the digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins. The same diet also meant more vitamins and minerals; more substances like lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene, which helps protect against chronic disease. And it would mean less refined carbohydrates and trans fats, both implicated in heart disease and other ailments.

  When I got home, I couldn’t stop talking about the camp. My dad built me a slide board out of Formica and plywood and two-by-fours. I spent hours in the basement on that thing, going back and forth, back and forth, trying to replicate the skating movements of the Norwegians and Finns. Dad welded me a bicycle, too. He got an old girls’ bike and welded a bar across the top. When I wasn’t in the basement on the slide board or riding my bike or logging mile after mile running, I was studying the Finnish videotapes and the Swedish books on exercise physiology that I’d managed to get through interlibrary loan (that took some doing).

  I continued my dietary education, too. The winter of my senior year, I joined my ski team buddy, Ben Deneen, and his stepdad, Ben Croft, on a ski trip to Minoqua, Wisconsin. They brought coolers and canvas bags full of whole wheat pasta and spinach salads and black bean chili. We stopped at the house of a friend from Team Birkie ski camp named Kurt Wulff, and his mom served us homemade granola. I asked her for the recipe, and when I got home I told my dad I wanted to make granola for ev
eryone, and I showed him the ingredients. He told me to call a cooperative run out of an old house, with the name Whole Foods Co-Op (no affiliation with the national chain), to see if they had soy flour and wheat germ and barley flakes. I wasn’t eating granola and salads because I wanted to make a better world (that would come later) or be nice to cows. I was just noticing that the more I ate what I thought of then as hippie food, the better I felt—and the better I raced. Before high school races, on the morning bus ride I began to eat a big bowl of brown rice I had made the night before. I hid the rice as I ate it because I knew the grief I’d get if anyone noticed. (I tried to educate my family, but slowly. I suspected spinach lasagna might be too much, so I stuck with granola and occasional brown rice for many months at home.)

  By the time I was a senior, I was ranked ninth in the state. There was only one local kid who was faster. He was not only the best skier around, he was also the best swimmer and bicycle racer. He had already won the regional championship in cross-country running and was a top competitor at the state meet. That would have been enough, but the word was, he had been expelled from school at least a few times, as well as been thrown off the team for skipping class and mouthing off to coaches.

  I had first seen him two years earlier, when our school bus was going through Duluth. Outside on a street corner stood a guy in a bright pink and yellow ski outfit—no school wore those colors—with a yellow ribbon hanging out the back. He carried three pairs of skis and had a punk hairdo, with half of his head shaved, the other half in a ponytail. As if he needed to call any more attention to himself, he was yelling and waving for us to stop. It turned out his coach had left him behind to teach him a lesson because he was such a rebel (he refused to wear his school’s colors; his uniform was a personal creation). So he had called up Proctor, told them where he would be, and asked if they would pick him up. Coach Sorenson agreed; he always had a weak spot for outsiders.

  Everyone had a story about this guy—how he never trained, how he would race hungover, all kinds of things. But man, could he ski! I had never seen someone with so much talent. The word around town was, he never made it past regionals because he was such a screw-up and was always on the verge of flunking out (report cards came out after regionals but before state). I remember thinking that if I had his talent, there is no way I’d let my grades slip.

  When he climbed the stairs of our dinged-up yellow bus, he didn’t know any of our names. But we knew his. He was the bad boy legend, the greatest athlete in the state, the juvenile delinquent parents warned their kids to avoid. He was the rogue prince of the cake eaters.

  His name was Dusty Olson, and he was going to change my life.

  Stretching

  Some people needn’t bother with stretching. If you have good biomechanics, don’t spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and have the kind of lifestyle where you can nap or take a dip in the ocean whenever you want, you might be one of them. Otherwise, stretch.

  Focus on the “runner’s five”: hamstrings, hip flexors, quadriceps, calves, and the iliotibial (IT) band, or connective tissue that runs from your hip down the outside of the leg. These are the muscle groups that tighten even when people aren’t running, from bad posture, sitting, repetitive activities, and just living.

  Though there are myriad exercises to choose from for each area (I suggest The Whartons’ Stretch Book for clear instructions and diagrams), what’s important is to do them correctly and regularly.

  For example, to stretch the hamstring, lie flat on your back and loop a belt or piece of rope around the ball of one foot, holding the ends of the rope in each hand. Keeping your legs straight, lift the roped leg (without pulling on the rope) as high as you can. Keep lifting until you feel a slight stretch in the back of the thigh, then use the rope to pull until the stretch is slightly—but just slightly—deeper. The stretch should be neither difficult nor painful. Hold for 2 seconds. Then relax and lower your leg to the floor. Repeat five to ten times.

  This exercise uses the Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) technique, which I prefer and which is quick (you can do your daily routine in 5 to 10 minutes), easy, and effective. Whether you stretch before exercise or after (as I do), using the active isolated technique, there’s no excuse not to stretch.

  Apple-Cinnamon Granola

  The secrets to this recipe are the soaked oat groats and the hemp milk. Soaking the oat groats (the whole-grain form of oats) promotes the release of enzymes that aid digestion. Hemp seeds are high in omega-3 fatty acids, and hemp milk creates a creamy, light accompaniment to the crunchy granola. It’s perfect for before or after a morning workout or race.

  1–2 teaspoons coconut oil

  4 cups raw oat groats, soaked in water for 6 to 8 hours or overnight, then drained

  1 apple, cored and sliced

  ½ cup dried coconut flakes

  2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

  2 tablespoons maple syrup or 1 tablespoon agave nectar

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  ½ teaspoon sea salt

  ½ cup raw almonds, chopped

  ½ cup pumpkin seeds, chopped

  ⅔ cup raisins

  Preheat the oven to 250°F. Grease two baking sheets with the oil.

  Process the oats, apple, coconut, cinnamon, sweetener, vanilla, and salt in a food processor for 30 seconds. Scrape sides, process for another 30 seconds, and repeat one more time. Transfer the mixture to a large mixing bowl and combine with the almonds, pumpkin seeds, and raisins. Mix thoroughly with a spoon.

  Spread the mixture in a thin layer on the prepared baking sheets. Bake for 2 to 4 hours, turning the granola over a few times with a spatula, until dried and crisp. You can set the oven temperature higher and reduce the baking time, but be sure to check frequently to avoid burning.

  Cool and stir in the raisins. Serve with non-dairy milk and sliced banana or fresh berries. Keeps for 3 to 4 weeks in an airtight container.

  MAKES 8–10 SERVINGS

  Hemp Milk

  ¼ cup raw shelled hemp seeds

  4 cups water

  ¼ teaspoon sea salt

  1–2 teaspoons agave nectar or maple syrup (optional)

  Place the hemp seeds, water, and salt in a blender and blend on high for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth and milky. For sweeter milk, add agave nectar or maple syrup to taste. Hemp milk keeps for 4 to 5 days in the refrigerator.

  MAKES 5 CUPS

  5. The Pride of the Cake Eaters

  RUNNING AROUND WITH DUSTY, 1992–93

  Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

  —KURT COBAIN

  Dusty’s dad spent his days at the bars, and his mom—who worked at the Lutheran church—would give Dusty a quarter and tell him to go play. That was when he was five years old. He rode his BMX bike to the Y and spent the day there, swimming, running around, getting into trouble. When Dusty was twelve, his dad drove the family car to a bar and never came back. Soon after that he divorced Dusty’s mom, and Dusty didn’t see his father for years. His mom started dating a guy who hated Dusty and kicked him around. Dusty didn’t spend much time at home.

  I, on the other hand, was either studying, helping my mom around the house, skiing, lifting weights (something I learned about at ski camp), or hanging out with my girlfriend. (It seemed that girls liked athletes.)

  Dusty drank. All the kids knew that. We also knew (or thought we knew) that he mouthed off to cops and seduced not just high school girls but barmaids and coeds. He didn’t just beat people in races but called them names, laughed at them, and insulted their families when he did it. He had no discipline and was wasting his prodigious talent. We all knew that: cake eaters, greasers, and rural rednecks alike.

  But in the spring of 1992, when Dusty and I were seniors, I learned how much I didn’t know.

  Dusty and I stayed together at the USSA Junior Nationals in Rumford, Maine. There were cross-country skiers from every state where it was a sport. The conditions couldn’t have bee
n worse. It was 55 degrees, and the snow was like frozen yogurt. The next day it rained 2 inches, and a cold snap the following night froze the trails into skating rinks. But every day the coaches would put us through training exercises. And every day Dusty would talk back. He wanted to know why we were doing this drill or that drill. He wanted to know why we weren’t doing more kilometers. He told all of us that the coaches were a joke. He told the coaches they were a joke. I couldn’t believe they didn’t kick him out the first day. I had never talked back to an adult. I had never questioned a coach. He read my face and told me to relax, they were just a bunch of pussies anyway. He called me “Jurker” and a “dumb Polack,” but the way he said it, I didn’t feel insulted.

  The first day of competition, in a 10K race, Dusty took a really bad fall on an icy hairpin turn with only 2K to go. He took some time getting up, and I knew something was wrong because he was in third place and closing. He calmly announced that he had broken his ankle. The coaches told him to suck it up, no one had broken an ankle. They knew all that they needed to know about Dusty. He was just trying to get attention. They told him to get a good night’s sleep and to be ready to race the next day.

  In his room that night, when he took off his boot, his foot was so purple it was almost black. It looked like a black volleyball, but Dusty didn’t say anything. There were no wisecracks. I was actually a little disappointed. Maybe the guy wasn’t such a badass after all. When he showed up for his start the next day, his ankle was so swollen, he couldn’t even pull his boot on. But he tried. He didn’t say a word, just tried to yank that boot up so he could race. Finally one of the coaches from another team, who happened to be a doctor, saw what was going on and yelled at him to stop, that they were driving to the hospital. Dusty got X-rayed and sure enough, it was broken.