Again, racing for me was about energy management.
Being in school is the best place to be if you are an athlete because you can structure your own time.
The potential elite runner must realize that hard means hard, easy means easy and they must patiently seek out what combinations work for them. They have to learn to be persistent and patient with their training and racing.
I also held several masters running titles.
So, in a way I was hedging and saying that if the Olympic stuff doesn’t work out at least I can be a lawyer.
The marathon is all about energy management. I had planned to run it like a track race with strategic surges to blow up my competitors by putting them into oxygen debt, so that is the way I prepared.
There’s obviously some validity to it. But I think it also points out that you obviously can do it on your own because people have been doing it long before they had the stuff.
Yes, winning the gold medal was undoubtedly the biggest day of my career – mostly because I won the way I had prepared to run it. It was a totally satisfying experience.
For the novice runner, I’d say to give yourself at least 2 months of consistently running several times a week at a conversational pace before deciding whether you want to stick with it. Consistency is the most important aspect of training at this point.
I was actually going to law school in 1972.
I think the secret of my light, quick, foot strike is related to the fact that I have fragile feet.
It is just called Continuing Legal Education. You can go to lectures, you can even listen to tapes on airplanes – they want you to stay current. So you do have to stay current to maintain your license even if you are not practicing.
When you first run up First Avenue in New York, if you don’t get goose bumps, theres something wrong with you.
I think it is that parents just don’t kick their kids out the door as much as they used to. I think the demise of sandlot sports has had a lot to do with it.
The irony of that is, what makes it kind of ironic, is when you do become successful as a professional athlete in particular, a lot of the young children who are emulating these stars do have a different perspective.
Numbers don’t lie. You always seem to remember your workouts as being a little better than they were. It’s good to go back and review what you do.
The weather is perfect. The gods are shining on us.
My goal is to break three hours in a marathon.
Right now, after having had back surgery, I am finally back to running again.
I think he had a wake-up call. It’s a different kind of race, and I think maybe he didn’t take it quite as seriously as he might have, but you can bet he learned a lot of lessons.
How did I know you ran a 4:30 mile in high school? That’s easy. Everyone ran a 4:30 mile in high school.