I ran intervals on the track yesterday. On my way out of the office, when I told my colleagues where I was going, they called me crazy. Why the heck was I running intervals just nine days after shattering into a million tiny pieces at the Boston Marathon? they asked. I told them I had my reasons. And I did.

The workout I planned was the classic 5 x 1000 meters with 400m jog recoveries. As for pace, I just planned to go by feel, since I had little sense of what I would be capable of. More important to me than running a certain pace was running a well-paced workout, which for me meant running each interval at least as fast as the previous one, running all five intervals within a few seconds of the same pace, and finishing good and tired but not exhausted.

I resolved to not even look at my watch for 400m splits. The fact of the matter was that I had been traumatized by most of the interval workouts I had done in the last 12 weeks before Boston. I was always chasing very aggressive target times and often slowing way down as the workouts unfolded as a result of going too hard in pursuit of these times at the beginning. Yesterday I just wanted to treat myself to the experience of a successful interval workout, even if my performance didn't set the world on fire.

I'm happy to report that it worked out perfectly. My interval times were 3:17, 3:16, 3:15, 3:14, 3:14. While I've certainly run this workout faster before, I consider the times not bad for me considering the fact that I had run a marathon nine days earlier and I hadn't run at this intensity for several weeks. Plus, my legs were still in a state of panic in response to the sudden imposition of almost daily bike workouts beginning a week earlier. But what made me happiest about the workout was that I did not slow downI sped up!and I did it all completely by feel.

It probably seems that I am making too much of this, but I am sick of slowing down, in both workouts and races. I got more than my fill of it in my disappointing last training cycle. I plan to make speeding up a big priority in my training and racing going forward, even if that requires me to set my sights lower for a while. In the long run, though, I believe, I will perform better as a result of getting back in touch with my limits and staying within them.

A new study relevant to this topic was recently published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Scientists from James Cook University in Australia had a group of cyclists perform a series of 30K time trials and time to exhaustion rides. Specifically, eight moderately trained subjects rode a pair of 30K time trials at a freely chosen pace and a pair of rides to exhaustion at a fixed intensity intensity that matched their average power output in the time trials. All of the rides were done on separate occasions in a rested state.

All of the subjects started faster than they finished, but some slowed down more than others. Interestingly, those cyclists who started at greater than 105 percent of their average power output for the full 30K were able to ride farther than 30K in a ride to exhaustion performed at their average power output in the 30K TT's, clearly indicating that they could have finished their TT's with faster overall times if they had started a little slower.

The authors of the study concluded, "The present investigation provided indirect evidence that a fast start pacing strategy decreases finishing speed and overall performance in TT30, and increased TT performance can be achieved by selecting a starting pace no more than 5% above TTAvg."

Thanks for the reminder.

Runners blow up in every marathon, but in Boston the carnage is

especially extreme, at least at the front of the pack. I think this is

the case in part because of the race's unique elevation profile and in

part because the race is uniquely competitive. A look through the

results of any recent Boston Marathon tells the whole story. Among the

first 100 finishers, there are four or five whose second-half split is

much slower than their first for every one who ran relatively even

splits. And this despite the fact that all of them were warned, I'm

sure.

I am determined not to become one of those sad statistics,

so last weekend I scoured the 2008 results for a Boston pacing role

model. I found him in Rick Clendaniel, Jr. Rick finished 99th overall

last year with a time of 2:35:28. I would be very happy to do the same

this year.  Rick's second-half split was only 57 seconds slower than

his first, which is just about perfect, since the second half contains

all of the uphills. The guy who finished one place and one second ahead

of Rick was 2:55 ahead of him at the halfway mark. That dude had to

have been at least somewhat disappointed in his final result, whereas

Rick undoubtedly achieved something very close to the fastest finish

time he was capable of that day.

Interestingly, judging by the

full breakdown of 5K splits, it appears that Rick did begin to make the

classic mistake of being sucked out too fast on the downhills leading

out of Hopkinton. He ran his first 5K in 17:50, or 5:44 per mile--some

12 seconds faster than his overall pace for the marathon. But unlike so

many others, Rick caught himself before it was too late. His second 5K

split was 18:35 (5:59/mile). His remaining splits were 18:34, 18:36,

18:23, 18:21, 18:50, and 18:11.

Those last two are particularly

noteworthy. The stretch from 30K to 35K is the toughest in the whole

race, with Heartbreak Hill and all that. Yet Rick averaged 6:03.7

through that stretch--only seven seconds per mile off his overall pace.

This means that he increased his effort level during this segment of

the race, which in turn means that he was able to. And not only that,

but after running harder from 30K to 35K than he had in any previous

segment, Rick had enough left to then run his fastest 5K split of the

entire race (with the exception of his crazy opening 5K) between 35K

and 40K. He must have passed a lot of runners there!

All in all,

it's a very impressive run. I doubt there's anything Rick could have

done differently after 5K that would have gotten him to the finish line

faster. I'd like to achieve my 2:35 with a slower opening 5K than

Rick's, but otherwise his performance is a terrific model for my race.

Studying it, I realize that I had better feel fantastic still when I

hit the hills at 16 miles, and this will require that I stick to

running 5:54-5 miles from the start no matter how super-mega-awesomely

fantastic I feel throughout the first half.

It pays to do your research.

This morning I tried the Tabata protocol for the first time. Until today it was one of those workouts that I had told others how to do without ever having experienced it myself. I decided to give it a go this morning on my CycleOps 300PT indoor trainer because I am trying desperately to hold onto the fitness I built for the Boston Marathon despite not being able to run lately due to injury, and because I am looking ahead to my training for Ironman Arizona and wanting to establish a foundation of cycling fitness as quickly as possible, and the Tabata protocol is perfectly designed to meet both of these needs. It packs a massive aerobic and anaerobic training stimulus into a very small session, and this quality makes it well suited both to maintaining fitness during periods of reduced training volume and to developing fitness quickly in modalities in which one is relative untrained and cannot yet handle more traditional hard workouts.

The Tabata protocol is applicable to a variety of modalities, but it works best on a stationary bike. I recently bought a truly awesome indoor trainerthe aforementioned CycleOps 300 PTfor my Ironman training and store it in the second bedroom of my new apartment, so it's especially convenient for me to do this sort of workout in this particular modality.

The Tabata protocol, named after Japanese exercise physiologist Izumi Tabata, consists of 8 x 20-second intervals at maximum intensity with 10-secondthat's right, 10-secondpassive recoveries between intervals. That's two minutes and 40 seconds of all-out sprinting in a period of four minutes. There is pretty much no modification to this format that you could possibly make to increase the combined aerobic/anaerobic challenge that it imposes. Those 10-second rests are just long enough to allow one to sustain an intensity level through the 2:40 of total work that is substantially higher than one could sustain in a 2:40 maximum effort without breaks, but not long enough to make the aerobic demand any lower than it would be in a 2:40 time trial.

The coaches and trainers I have interviewed about Tabata intervals have told me that it is just about the most immiserating exercise experience you could imagine--an unmitigated sufferfest. So I was prepared to hurt. I had also been told that it takes a couple of tries to get the hang of the workout. You have to fumble through it a couple of times before you find the resistance level that allows you to perform the maximum total amount of work in the eight intervals. So I was prepared to have to make adjustments as I went.

I started with a 10-minute warm-up, then cranked up the resistance and sprinted. Or so I thought. But about three-quarters of the way through that first interval I realized that I was pacing myself and increased my power output substantially in the last 5 seconds.

The first 10-second rest brought me more relief than I had expected and left me reay to go truly all-out from the beginning of the second interval. But early in the third interval I realized I had miscalculated the appropriate resistance level. I bonked horribly, finding myself able to turn the pedals only two-thirds as fast as I had in the second interval yet hurting even more. So I reduced the resistance level during my third rest period and achieved an all-out effort in the remaining intervals by turning the cranks at a furious cadence.

I found a groove in those last five intervals. In fact, the workout turned out to be not quite as hard as I had expected it to be. Don't get me wrong--it was hard; but I had expected it to be harder than the interval workouts I am accustomed to doing, and it was not. In retrospect I'm not surpised. Tabata intervals are practiced and prescribed mostly by gym exercisers who know nothing of the suffering that occurs in your typical track workout. So for them, Tabata is like being fileted alive. For endurance athletes it's just another workout.

Except not quite. Few endurance athletes ever combine all-out sprint intervals with very short rest periods. After completing my first Tabata session this morning I felt as hollow-legged, oxygen-starved, and light-headed, and was sweating as profusely, as I do after the most brutal track session, but the whole **** workout had lasted only 15 minutes!

In the study that made the workout that bears his name famous, Izumi Tabata found that six weeks of the protocol increased the VO2max of trained subjects by 14 percent and increased their anaerobic capacity by 28 percent. I hope that it works half as well for me, but I'm not exactly sure how I will be able to judge how well it is working. Perhaps, if I still run sub-2:40 in Boston despite running fewer than 50 miles in the last 25 days preceding it, I will be able to credit Tabata!

Sometimes I wish I could fast-forward life a bit. Don't we all? Of course we do; that's why the Adam Sandler comedy Click was made. But as that film demonstrated, it's really best that we don't have that kind of power. I like the scene when Sandler's character, Michael Newman (I looked it up-who actually remembers these things?) suddenly finds himself at an office party celebrating his big promotion after having fast-forwarded past several months of his life in which he had to bust his *** and sacrifice to earn the promotion. Sandler's character is less than halfhearted in accepting the congratulations of his coworkers because skipping the struggle to get where he now finds himself stripped away any possible satisfaction he could derive from his ultimate triumph. For all of Click's faults, there is an astute undertanding of human nature that informs this scene, which appeals to me especially because I have always been the kind of guy who would not want to win the lottery. Rewards are worse than meaningless to me unless I earn them. I don't mean to suggest that I am a tower of virtue; I've just always noticed that I feel like Adam Sandler's as Michael Newman at his promotion party when rewards come to me too easily.

There are times, though, when I would be sorely tempted to use a life fast-forward button if I had one. And now is one of those times, because of my Achilles tendon injury. The situation is this: I will run the Boston Marathon in three and a half weeks. I am in excellent shape. But last night I decided that my Achilles injury is severe enough that I must discontinue running and let it heal, lest the injury become so severe that I cannot run the marathon at all, let alone perform respectably. Intellectually, I know that if I cross-train aggressively-which I will do-I will remain fit enough to run well in Boston even if I can only do half as much running as I had planned to do in the next 24 days (and perhaps no running whatsoever for three or four days). But because I am a competitive endurance athlete and have the mindset of same, in my heart I believe that I will be fat and completely out of shape within a week if I don't continue running as planned. Having been through situations like this one many times before, I know that in perhaps 10 or 11 days I will do a challenging test run and be pleasantly surprised by my performance; thus, if I had a life fast-forward button right now I would want to use it to leap ahead to that moment of relief and skip past all the pain and worry and drudgery (elliptical training-ugh!) I will have to endurance between now and then.

The best I can do is remind myself what I would tell an athlete I was coaching who was in my current situation: "Don't worry, you'll be fine." And I would mean it. But it's different when the worried athlete is you. I suppose the other thing I can't remind myself is how halfhearted my celebration of finishing the Boston Marathon with a good time would be if I did skip over the challenge that is now facing me.

I am in the process of movingspecifically, from an apartment in downtown San Diego to another apartment in the Rancho Penasquitos area of San Diego. For endurance athletes like us, a change of home addresses is also a change of exercise environments. The wisest and/or more compulsive among us factor exercise environmental considerations heavily into their relocation decisions. I certainly have done so (whether through wisdom or compulsiveness it is not for me to say)for example when I convinced  my wife to move with me into an apartment complex that had its own lap pool. Others just hope for the best and simply find out what sort of exercise environment they have put themselves into after their move is completed. But no amount of preparatory research can prepare you fully for what it will be like to train in a new area.

The main factors that my wife and I considered in choosing our new home were location, the size and quality of the apartment itself, and price. Our new place is closer to my office, twice the size of our downtown apartment, and $900 per month cheaper. I did not think about the exercise environment much except to note that there is an L.A. Fitness facility with an indoor lap pool located smack between the apartment complex and my office. I will join it just as soon as I get home from the Boston Marathon and start training for Ironman Arizona in earnest.

I had heard that there are extensive trails in Rancho Penasquitos, and I had hoped that what I had heard was true, because at first glance Rancho Penasquitos does not look like a very nice place to run. It's extremely hilly and most of the roads are very highly trafficked. The closest flat stretch to run on is Mira Mesa Boulevard, which is strip mall ****. So I took a leap of faith in moving to that area.

Yesterday evening I went for my first run there--an easy 10-miler. I left the apartment complex and made a right turn on a road that took me up a long, steep hill. When I got to the top I saw nothing but other big hills all around me (my choice: up or down). I found a small park and ran a few desultory laps around a baseball field, fearing that I was going to absolutely hate running in my new neighborhood. Then I decided to see if I couldn't find those trails. I bombed back down that long, steep hill and made a turn onto the road that seemed most likely to lead to the trails I had been told of. Sure enough, I was scarcely three miles into my run (and less than three-quarters of a mile from where I had started) when I stumbled into a vast nature preserve.

Moments later I was pacing along a beautiful equestrian trail leading into the wildernessan equestrian trail with actual horses and riders on it! I ran three miles out and there was still no end in sight when I turned around and headed back home. The trail wasn't perfectit had some rocky sections and a few short technical stretches that brought me to a near standstill, but even so, I haven't had such easy access to a natural running environment such as this in a very long time. And I have a feeling that there are many more delightful trails in the area that I am soon to discover.

Suddenly I'm really looking forward to the run training that I will do this summer in preparation for Ironman Arizona!

This morning Jim Woodman of Pathway Genomics, a start-up consumer genetic testing company based here in San Diego, visited the offices of the competitor Group. I am going to write an article about Pathway and, more broadly, about the nascent industry of consumer genetic testing, particularly as it relates to athletes, for Triathlete, and I'm excited about it, not least of all because I will get a free, comprehensive genetic analysis out of the bargain.

I've known Jim Woodman for a long time. He used to publish Florida Sports magazine. In the late '90s he created a website called ActiveUSA, which was purchased by a company by RaceGate, which then became Active.com. I met Jim in 2000 when he was working as Active's senior VP of business development and I was hired there as a content editor. I'm not sure exactly when or why Jim left Active, but he seems pretty excited about his new gig. And I can see why. His business is on the frontier of a world-changing phenomenon. Genetic analysis is fairly primitive today, but before long it will have amazing capabilities, and companies such as Pathway will drive that evolution, so to speak. As Jim said, "We're like the Internet in 1993."

There are lots of genetic testing outfits out there, but most are narrowly focused on testing for such things as paternity. Pathway is one of only four noteworthy companies in the world that does very broad testing. They do the paternity thing, as well as ancestry, genetic predisposition for numerous diseases, pharmacogenetic testing (which potentially reveals that certain medications won't work on you, or will kill you), carrier screening (which reveals the likelihood that you will pass along certain disease risks to your offspring), and "interesting traits" such as athletic potential.

I am most interested in learning about my athletic genes. The trouble is that currently Pathway only tests for one genetic marker of athletic potential, which is the sprinter's gene. I told Jim I already know I don't have that one. And in point of fact, through many years of training and racing I already know virtually everything that any number of genetic markers could possibly reveal to me. I strongly believe that there is no better test of athletic performance potential than athletic performance itself. Why bother getting a VO2max test when you can run a 5K? Why bother getting a gene test when you can run a 5K? But I do see some potential for genetic analysis to have some benefit for athletes down the road. There are genes that determine not only raw potential for endurance, speed and so forth but also how the body responds to different types of training. So it's conceivable that genetic testing could be used one day to help athletes develop customized training programs that cultivate their potential with less trial and error. Maybe not, but maybe.

Of course I am interested in learning about my health risks. I don't think I'm one of those people who will freak out if I learn that I am predisposed for early-onset Alzheimer's disease (which is not to say I would bear the news with complete equanimity). And I am also interested in learning about my ancestry. Several years ago my mother did some genealogy research that led her to the discovery that she may have some Jewish blood. Until then I had thought I was nothing but Irish, Scotch, and English. I'd love to confirm that I am one of the Chosen People!

The testing process is very simple: I just have to spit in a vial and FedEx it to the Pathway lab. Within eight weeks I will know who I am. I will let you know if I find out anything interesting.

I am so happy that the phenomenon of pacing has become the object of serious scientific exploration lately, after having been almost entirely ignored throughout the history of the discipline of exercise science. Pacing is to me one of the most fascinating phenomena in endurance sports. In any race lasting longer than approximately 20 seconds one must go as fast as one can without going as fast as one can, if you know what I mean. That is a tricky challenge-arguably the single greatest challenge in endurance competition.

And yet this challenge was not only ignored for a century but so overlooked as to scarcely be recognized as existing. I think there are two reasons for this oversight. First, scientists could not see inside the brain, which is obviously the seat of pace regulation. Second, scientists could see inside the rest of the body, and since scientists always exaggerate the importance of what they can see, they came to explain pacing regulation-absurdly-entirely in terms of physiological events occuring below the neck. For example, they presented the argument that lactic acid accumulation prevents runners from sustaining a pace faster than the lactate threshold in marathons, overlooking the simple fact that if lactic acid levels acted as a pace governor in any circumstance then no runner could ever exceed his or her lactate threshold pace regardless of the race distance.

More recently, some curmudgeonly exercise scientists have responded to the new line of research into the pacing phenomenon by dismissing it as "too obvious" to merit such scrutiny. These scientists contend that endurance athletes simply know how far each race is and consciously hold themselves back appropriately instead of being stupid and sprinting their way to a quick and complete bonk from the starting line.

A new study by researchers at the University of Exeter shows how it really is. Eighteen competitive cyclists were divided into two groups, each of which performed a series of four, 4 km cycling time trials separated by 17-minute recovery periods. Both groups were instructed to complete each time trial in the shortest time possible, but members of one group were told the distance of the time trials before starting and were given distance feedback information throughout each trial, whereas members of the second group completed all four time trials blindly, although aware that the distance (whatever it was) of the four time trials was the same.

As you probably could have predicted, in the first time trial members of the blind group were far more conservative than members of the aware group and completed the time trial  much more slowly. But with each subsequent repetition of the time trial the blind cyclists went a little faster until, in the fourth and last time trial, the average finish times of the two groups were identical.

These results provide clear evidence that the subconscious brain plays a dominant role in the regulation of pace in race-type efforts. If below-the-neck physiology governed pace, the cyclists in the blind group would not have exhibited a learning effect over the course of the four time trials. Instead they would have performed exactly as the distance-aware cyclists did from the get-go. On the other hand, if pacing were controlled consciously, it is also unlikely that the times of the blind cyclists would have converged with those of the aware cyclists by the fourth time trial, as the blind cyclists had no distance information at their disposal at any time, but had to learn to pace the time trials optimally entirely by feel.

Last Saturday I won a 10K road race with 1,025 finishers by two minutes. That is a worthy accomplishment. Very few runners are fortunate enough to enjoy the experience of breaking the tape at a large running event so far ahead of the next athlete that a cool-down jog is well underway by the time that next athlete finishes. Yet I was overwhelmed with disappointment when I stopped the clock at the Super Run 10K in San Diego this past weekend, because my goal had been not to win but to break my 10K personal record, and I came up two seconds short of achieving the latter. I've never really cared much about where I place in events. I've always been a time geek. And so a race performance that observers might have assumed I was proud of left me feeling hollow.

When I tried to explain my disappointment to my wife later she very sensibly told me I was crazy. She said she believed I was possessed of a spirit of discontent. No matter what I do, I'm never satisfied. That charge is fair in one sense, but wrong in another. I derive great general satisfaction from being a runner, and from being a pretty good runner. For me there is satisfaction in the feeling of fitness that I enjoy in daily workouts and in the accumulation of miles that I see within each week of training. I feel satisfaction in knowing that I tried my best in races-that I did not shrink from suffering-and sometimes I am even proud of my results.

But I am never satisfied with my race performances in the sense of being content never to improve on a newly set standard. To the contrary, even my very best performances are savored for no more than an hour or two before I start thinking about how much faster I could run in the future if I changed this, tried that, etcetera.

Sports psychologists say that the "spirit of discontent" is a hallmark psychological characteristic of high-performing athletes. Among them is Stephen Long, PhD, author of Level Six Performance. "Excellence begins with a level of dissatisfaction with your performance and productivity-fulfillment is overrated," Long writes therein. There are countless examples of elite athletes who spend little time celebrating their victories before setting down their trophies and scanning the horizon for new goals. My favorite example is that of the insatiable Haile Gebrselassie, the first words out of whose mouth after setting his second marathon world record in Berlin last year were "I can run faster." That is totally awesome.

Those who do not share the champion athlete's never-satisfied mindset might read Geb's words and feel sorry for him and assume that running does not make him happy. But he could well be the happiest runner on earth. He's so happy being a runner that he refuses to talk of retiring, but promises to keep training, racing and striving until he is effectively dragged out of the sport by the bodily disintegration of aging. The spirit of discontent not only does not stand in the way of Gebrselassie's enjoyment of running but is in fact the very manner in which he enjoys running. He just can't get enough speed in much the same way lovers can't get enough time together and some musicians can't get enough performing.

Make no mistake: Never satisfied is good.