Grip and Rip
By
Woody Green
of
RUNNERS NICHE
Dante Bichette, an outstanding outfielder for the Colorado Rockies
baseball team, recently made an interesting statement. Bichette is
known to spend hours studying the opposing pitchers and looking at
videotape of his swing. He is a true student of the game, and he thinks
about it all the time. He's well known for his ability to guess what
the pitcher will throw him based on his observations, this normally
affords him quite an advantage. After a game when he smashed a couple
of long balls, the reporters asked Bichette what his strategy was. He
said he had a good day because stopped thinking and he just "gripped
and ripped," meaning he just grabbed the bat and swung hard at whatever
came. He felt he'd actually been thinking too much lately, and that
might have hurt him.
Runners are often guilty of thinking too much. Of course, just like
Bichette, runners should be students of their sport. Heading into a
race it's good to know what the course is like, and having an idea what
pace you'd like to run is smart strategy. Training should be planned
out in some sort of logical manner, with forethought and sound
principals behind the scheme. The problem is that you can also
strategize yourself to bits.
In a recent race Skipper (name changed to protect his identity) was
really ready to run a good 5 K. He was bouncing around at the starting
line, and at the gun he went out hard. When he hit the one-mile mark
and heard his split, he slowed and walked off the course. His one-mile
split was very fast, and he felt certain that he had sabotaged his own
race. At first he was mad at himself for going out so hard, later he
wished he had just continued on to the finish to see what he could have
done. The split time became too important to him. His brain got in the
way. If he hadn't heard his split, maybe he could have still run a
decent race, even if it wasn't as good as he had originally hoped.
Another runner, Not Imex (not his real name), purposely never wears a
watch when he races. He knows that, for him, the best feedback he can
get is what his body is telling him. The watch can influence him to go
too hard, or to limit him to a "reasonable" pace that may actually be
too slow for him on that day. He even tries not to listen when splits
are called out at the mile markers. He doesn't think about it, he just
runs. This is sort of the running equivalent of "grip and rip" for a
batter in baseball.
Similar situations can develop with respect to training plans. No
matter if the plan is laid out by a coach, a computer training program,
or a book, runners often fail to remember that a workout plan is just a
plan, not a dictatorial decree that must be followed come hell or high
water. Many runners are so bent on doing a particular workout on a
particular day that it becomes counter-productive. Sometimes runners
try to complete a workout that is just too hard. This ends in
frustration at best, physical breakdown at worst. Other times we try to
complete a workout in weather conditions that make our original time
goals impossible. This is a bad idea since no matter how well we
understand that our times are slowed by the conditions, we can't help
but be disappointed with what our watch tells us. Modifying workout
plans is not a sin.
A top 51 year-old runner, (we'll call him Dave Dooley, since that's his
name) was asked by another runner how he plans his workouts. Dave is
almost never injured, and he regularly beats the pants off of runners
twenty years his junior. He indicated that he really more or less runs
how he feels each day. It's not like he doesn't plan workouts on the
track, fartlek sessions, tempo runs and long runs; but he does these
workouts only when he feels up for them. He keeps track of how many
miles he runs each week out of interest, but never plans his workouts
toward a particular mileage goal for the week. Sounds like "grip and
rip" to me.
None of this is meant to indicate that training and racing should be
purely random. We all do better with a well thought out plan for both
racing and training. Johnny Halberstadt, a great runner from South
Africa, says that one advantage the African runners have over Americans
and Europeans is that they run in an artistic way rather than a strict
scientific manner. There is a lot to be said for that. But, instead of
saying, "I'm going to run in an artistic manner," I prefer "I'm gonna'
grip and rip!"
