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Month: January 2024
Find Your “Why”
As I started thinking about this piece, I found a podcast on Todd Malcolm’s No Limits Triathlon website which helped me a lot. It’s Episode 151 (“Why do you train for triathlons?”) Kudos Todd, and thanks for the inspiration!
So, here’s a question for you: Have you ever thought about why you run?
(Feel free to substitute your own go-to activity for running, in what follows. I think it’s a valuable exercise, whatever the activity.)
There is a tendency to focus on the “what” of running, rather than the “why”. I might even go so far as to say that running has a “what” problem.
I recently overheard two runners engaged in an animated conversation. Their talk was all about the “what”… upcoming races and new technical gear. Make no mistake, these are important topics of discussion, and I know they can be very exhilarating. If you were to include discussions about training mileage and pace, I’d guess you have the “what” of running totally covered.
This is understandable, but in some ways unfortunate.
We live in a society that focuses to a large extent on “what” questions, often in the realm of personal and professional achievements. So it’s hardly surprising that the running community sees the same reality. For runners, there’s always another must-do race, the latest shoe, or a new sure-fire workout.
Here are a couple of recent product announcements that caught my eye:
- Adidas announced its latest high-performance shoe, the Adios Pro Evo 1. It’s a disposable shoe that is good for one marathon and sells for $650 CDN. Was it a coincidence that this announcement was made just before the B.A.A. announced its time cut-off for the 2024 Boston Marathon? Maybe. But there may soon be more demand for that shoe than Adidas can handle.
- Garmin announced a series of luxury GPS devices, the MARQ smartwatches, that will go for about $4,000 CDN. They feature a lot of titanium and carbon fibre, and according to Garmin, they are “built for greatness, so you can achieve yours”. I’m not sure how they will do that, but I admit they do look nice.
If you compete or just follow athletics, you understand this pressure… the pressure to always be improving. Acquiring. Checking boxes. Maybe you even thrive on it.
What’s my point? Well, I feel that for whatever good this pressure can do, it can also lead us to miss the whole point of running. We shouldn’t forget to consider the “why”. The “why” has nothing to do with equipment, races or training schedules.
You won’t find your why by adding things to your regimen. Instead, you should consider subtracting things. The why is inward-looking.
Ask yourself this: if you didn’t have a major goal race to motivate you; if you had to make do without the latest shoes or GPS watch; if you couldn’t track your training pace or upload your workouts to Strava, would you still run?
If the answer to this question is yes, then you are starting to get at the why.
If you are willing to go further with this mental exercise, try writing down some thoughts on your “why”. Maybe you enjoy the intrinsic benefits of running… how you feel while you are doing it. Maybe running is a place of refuge when the stress of everyday life seems overwhelming. Maybe you relish the camaraderie of long, easy runs with your friends. Or the challenge of setting hard goals, and then methodically doing the work needed to achieve them. You know, the work that no one sees.
I hope that by being able to define whatever special benefits you get from running, you will be better able to enhance its indispensable role in your life.
For me, it’s quite simple.
Running makes me a better person. I think more clearly, I work more efficiently and I believe (hope?) I’m more empathetic in my dealings with other people after a run. I learned these things several years ago, when I faced the prospect of not having running in my life.
You may have guessed that I won’t be on the wait list for any disposable shoes.
Until next time, happy running!
ICYMI: “Map to Triathlon” Podcast Interview
I had the great pleasure of chatting with Todd Malcolm a few months back, just as I was preparing to launch Stroke of Luck: My Life in Amateur Athletics. In case you missed it, I recommend you check out Episode 141 of Todd’s excellent podcast series, “Map to Triathlon”, which is a feature of his No Limits Triathlon program.
My interview with Todd was an opportunity for us to look back over our long relationship, which has revolved around our mutual interest in amateur sports. Todd is a highly accomplished triathlete, and has been a respected triathlon coach in Calgary for almost as long as I’ve been a runner. That’s a long time!
Todd and I talked about my memoir, and the events surrounding my hospitalization in 2017 for a number of vertebral artery strokes. I shared my hopes and fears arising from that difficult period of my life. As you can probably tell from the title of my book, I consider myself fortunate to have come through that ordeal as well as I did, and to still have running in my life.
At the time of our interview, Todd was recovering from a serious bike crash, so we shared our thoughts about the importance of overcoming adversity and keeping a positive attitude. In fact, I want to remind my readers of the endorsement that Todd kindly wrote for the cover of Stroke of Luck. It seems very appropriate:
Once I started reading Steve’s book I couldn’t stop. His story really resonated with me. This book encourages an active lifestyle and is a reminder that when you find your passion, find ways to keep doing it.
Todd Malcolm
While you’re on Todd’s No Limits Triathlon website, I encourage you to check out all of his coaching services, and the many other great podcast episodes he has assembled. In a recent podcast (Episode 151) he looks at the question, “Why do you train for triathlons?” Coincidentally, I have been preparing a blog piece on the same question (“Find Your Why”). Look for that piece soon.
Thanks, Todd, for taking the time to chat. Thanks too for everything you do to support amateur athletes in Calgary!
Treadmill… or Dreadmill?
My Resolution Sale is still on. Grab your copy of Stroke of Luck on Amazon for a New Year-inspired discount. This offer is only available until the end of the month!
This week, Alberta was invaded by an unwelcome visitor: the polar vortex. For a few days, we hoped that the forecast would turn out to be wrong. I enjoyed my last comfortable outdoor run on Tuesday with a feeling of impending doom. Change was already in the air: I left the house in fine weather and sunshine but spent the last two kilometres fighting a stiff, cold wind from the north.
Now we are in it. I read somewhere that today (Friday the 12th) was the coldest day in Calgary for the last 20 years. The prospect is for even colder weather in the next day or two.
While I always prefer to run outside, the time had clearly come to switch to plan B: the treadmill. We have put many miles on our Landice L7 treadmill since buying it in 2010. At the time, I wanted an alternative to outdoor running to get me through the Alberta winter, so I could run the 2011 Boston Marathon.
While the Landice has been a reliable machine and a good investment, I have never warmed up to it. That’s because I find running on a treadmill harder than running outside. To be precise, I find running a given pace on a treadmill feels harder than on the road.
I did some research into why this might be the case. I know it is a debate that has strong opinions on both sides. Some runners hold exactly the opposite opinion than I do. They find treadmill running to be easier than road running.
I’ve always assumed that my perception of treadmill running is due to it being a relatively recent activity for me. In other words, am I programmed for outdoor running because I’ve done it for so long? No, there must be more to it.
There are plenty of studies that compare the two environments, and most find several benefits of treadmill running. For example, the belt turning under us imparts energy to our feet as we land. Treadmill belts are rubber, so there ought to be a small benefit in terms of impact forces on our joints. The ability to control speed and incline can be helpful when recovering from an injury or looking for very specific training conditions.
On the other hand, studies have also shown that many runners do perceive treadmill running to be more difficult. The benefit of a spongier surface may come at the cost of requiring the runner to expend more energy. Apparently, runners tend to self-adjust to a slower speed than they would outside. One study (I only read the summary) had runners do three segments at perceived effort: outside, then on a treadmill, then outside. It found that the treadmill portion was slowest by a statistically significant margin.
On the physical side, I generally feel a bit of muscle soreness after a treadmill run. It would seem that I’m using different muscles, or interacting with the “ground” differently.
As for the perception of effort, I think it comes down to the way that our brains interact with our environment. I never get 100% comfortable moving while staying in the same spot. On a related point, while I agree that watching television is a welcome distraction available exclusively on a treadmill, I somehow get disoriented by the feeling of running toward the screen.
In practical terms, I find the best thing to do on a treadmill is a structured workout. Today, I did almost a full set of Yasso 800s (repeats of 800 metres at 10k pace). It’s a classic speed endurance workout, and it’s often cited as a predictor of marathon fitness. (Definitely not in my current plans!) Knowing that I have to complete a series of tasks (for example, run two laps on the little screen at a predetermined, not perceived, pace) helps me get past the feeling of confinement and boredom that often accompanies a treadmill run.
Besides, running in shorts and a T-shirt while looking out at a frozen -35c landscape isn’t all bad. And I did have a dram of Macallan 12-year-old sitting ready for me as a reward for getting through it.
We do what we have to do.
Prairie Mountain Sunrise, Part 2
The Science
NOTE: This article was updated in January 2026 to correct errors and expand on some of the concepts.
After we returned to Calgary from our December 29 Prairie Mountain sunrise hike, I started to wonder about the small anomaly that led us to pick that day. Specifically, the fact that the day with the latest sunrise does not align with the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Before I get into the science, here’s another photo from that memorable morning.
I did some research and learned the interesting astronomical reasons for this phenomenon. I first looked up the sunrise/sunset tables for southern Alberta. The solstice occurred at8:27 p.m. on December 21, but the latest sunrise occurred more than a week later. Not only that, the date of our earliest sunset was well before the solstice—way back on December 12, to be exact.
What’s going on here? After all, these differences are not small.
While it’s true that the solstice is the shortest day based on sunlight hours, it isn’t the shortest solar day, which is defined as the measured time for the sun to pass over a given meridian line from one day to the next. In fact, solar days are the longest in December. It’s important to note that solar days are not the same as clock days, which are the familiar 24-hour periods that we measure with our timepieces.
A recent article in Scientific American explains that there are two reasons for this counterintuitive result. With all credit to the excellent minutephysics video by Henry Reich (“Why December Has the Longest Days”) referenced in the article, I’ve reproduced the two reasons in the following chart.
First, the shape of the Earth’s orbit is not a circle but an oval, an ellipse. The difference between the earth’s nearest and farthest points from the sun is small, about 3 percent of its average orbital distance of 150 million kilometres. This matters because as the earth reaches its closest point (called the perihelion), it moves faster through space. This faster movement lengthens the solar day—again, that’s the time needed for a given line of longitude to come around the next day to align with the sun. This effect adds about eight seconds to the solar day.
Besides the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, the tilt of its axis also contributes to the disparity between solar day and clock day. This effect, called the obliquity effect, lengthens the solar days by about 20 seconds around the solstices and shortens them by about 20 seconds around the equinoxes.
The impact of these two factors on the solar day is well known. There is even an equation of time to relate solar time to clock time. Mathematically, the effect is represented by two sine wave functions. The frequency of the eccentricity curve matches the earth’s annual rotation, and the tilt curve goes through two cycles each year. The figure below was generated on PlanetCalc. It shows how adding the curves results in solar days that are shortest in February and longest in December. There is also a smaller peak in the spring and a dip in the summer.
Because perihelion occurs close to the winter solstice (on January 2), the two day-lengthening effects are additive, totalling about 30 seconds a day at the peak in November. These “extra” seconds are pushed forward to subsequent days, making solar noon (the precise time that the sun reaches its highest point in the sky each day) later and later at that time of the year. And because sunrises and sunsets are symmetrical around solar noon, we get the observed result: the earliest sunset gets shifted backward (before the solstice), and the latest sunrise gets pushed forward (after the solstice).
As a final point, if you were to do an experiment in which you marked the tip of the shadow cast by a sundial each day at precisely noon, it would trace out a unique, elongated figure eight shape over the course of a year. That shape is called an analemma, and it is a graph of the equation of time. Changes along the vertical axis of the curve are due to the tilt of the earth (cycling between -23.5 degrees to +23.5 degrees), and changes along the horizontal axis are due to the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit.
The figure at left is the analemma plotted at noon GMT from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England (Source: JPL Horizons Lab). I like this figure because it includes calendar notations, which make it easy to compare with the equation of time graph shown above.
Whew! I expected the answer to this question to be simple, but it’s taken me a few tries and a lot of soak time to understand. Somehow it seems appropriate, having just started a new year (and passed the perihelion), to recognize that the universe is full of mystery.
Until next time,
Prairie Mountain Sunrise, Part 1
My friend Tim can always be counted on to organize good outings. A coffee, a lunch, a hike. He organized our excellent excursion to Pocaterra Ridge in September to see the larches.
One of Tim’s good ideas in the last few years is a sunrise hike to the summit of Prairie Mountain in Kananaskis. He’s been considerate enough to arrange the hike on the day with the latest sunrise. This year, that day was December 29. Before the hike, I didn’t independently verify Tim’s assertion on this point. More on that in Part 2 of this post. But I did enjoy the extra two minutes of sleep that I was told would be available by delaying our hike from the winter solstice by eight days.
Dan and I joined the convoy that left Calgary at 6:20 to reach the trailhead by 7:10. A testament to the popularity of Tim’s idea is that our group was ten this year, up from five last year. Mind you, last year’s -20C temperature may have been a contributing factor. (I passed on that one.)
The hike was great. It was my first time on the new and improved Prairie Mountain trail. It’s now 8.4 km with 711 metres of elevation gain. The modifications evened out the trail’s steepest segments, added some Lawrence Grassi-like stone steps in a couple of places, and widened the trail. Even in the dark, lit by a headlamp, I liked the changes. I’m not a PM veteran or a mountain goat. I have done the hike maybe six times, in various weather conditions. And I’ve been in a couple of slippery situations on the old trail that left me wondering if we’d taken a wrong turn. It just never seemed safe to me. Now it does.
We may have been a bit late getting started. The southeastern sky was already lit with beautiful shades of pink at the first viewpoint. We hustled onward, knowing that if we could get onto the summit ridge we would see the sun break the horizon. Our time for the ascent was about 75 minutes.
We didn’t have long to wait once we reached the 2,210-metre summit. The light display was stunning. Sunbeams streamed around a lone cloud that was parked just above the horizon.
I had my Ricoh GR III with me. (Yes, I know, I say this often, but I really love this camera!) We snapped a few group shots as the sun made its appearance.
To the northwest, Moose Mountain was glowing, with snowy highlights and a rosy sky above.
We enjoyed the vistas and took more photos. As I reached for a snack, I realized that my fingers were freezing. It was deceptively cool, but thankfully the summit winds were moderate. That isn’t always the case on Prairie. We started down, trading our headlamps for sunglasses.
An enjoyable coffee and treat at the Bragg Creek Cafe & Baking Co. rounded out the morning.
Happy New Year to all!
My Second Running Life 