Posted: October 6, 2005
Science of Sport: What I Learned About Training From Uncle Bud
By Owen Anderson, Ph. D. (Copyright © 2004-2005)
When you are young, it is not necessary to have an idol. Sometimes, though, it helps.
At the age of 12, my cynosure was my uncle Bud. Technically, his name was Raymond J. Anderson, but Bud was better, like new growth, sprouting.
I loved him because of his approving smile, because he listened to me, asked me what I really wanted to do. He was 20 years more into the salad than my dad and stood in nicely for my uninterested brother.
He broke my heart at a baseball game when he said I had a slow swing, but I figured it was just like the game - he got two more strikes. When he asked if I would work on his farm during the summer, I changed instantly from a useless kid into a happy hand.
Drenched daily by the Iowa sun, my skin turned the color of cork. I walked the bean fields searching for errant corn, marched the maize meadows for eloping soy. I drove the Farmall and John Deere, dug post holes, cleaned out silos. I hand-milked the cows at 12-hour intervals, probed beneath surprisingly vicious chickens for warm brown eggs, poured fresh milk into troughs for frenzied pigs. Bud and I took 15-minute naps on the porch after ham-sandwich lunches and checked the box on the gravel road each afternoon for the Des Moines Register, our only - rather feeble - connection to the world outside our viridescent parabola of grain.
I didn't learn about the loft in the barn until August, when the hay, goldening in the field, became just crisp enough for Bud's blades. Bud showed me how to climb the ladder built into the interior wall and taught me to place my hands on the rim of the single, square loft entry so that I could vault into the warm, hazy, dry-grass-scented space, somehow avoiding what seemed to be an inevitable 30-foot plummet right back to the bottom.
When Bud went to Storm Lake for supplies, I pushed bales around until I had three hay-walled rooms set up in my newfound mansard - a library, with assorted dime football novels arranged on a straw shelf, an entertainment center to host the Johnson girls when they visited from the adjacent farm, and a hidden vault into which I could retreat on bad days, accompanied by a few barn cats and an occasional, extremely wary rat. This sepulcher, entered only by means of a hidden tunnel, was an especially good place to be when Bud was entertaining thoughts about undertaking certain, particularly odious jobs - like a thorough cleaning of the chicken coop.
Surprisingly, my hideaway became the venue for my first lesson about physical training. Early one morning, my friend Dean arrived at Bud's place, a tell-tale sign that hard work was about to take place. Bud instructed us to take positions in the loft, and soon he drove the first wagon-load of hay into the yard below. Dean was a bit top-heavy, and so it fell upon me to race down to the wagon, lower a large vise-like apparatus with two claws onto a huge mass of hay, and then rush back up the ladder and into the loft, in time to help Dean pull the hay conglomerate, by means of ropes and pulleys through an upper-story window and thus into our alcove. The hay was guided into position, the claws released, the vise sent back down, and I madly scrambled down the ladder in order to re-encounter the strange device in the wagon. The number of reps of this activity appeared to be infinite, given Bud's penchant for prolonged work and the large amount of land he had set aside for hay. In short, I spent several days rushing back and forth, climbing and descending, attaching and un-attaching, until the loft was nearly full and my three rooms were obliterated.
Yes, it was my first circuit workout; I was moving from place to place, engaging in a series of different exertions. The effect on my fitness was immediate. Suddenly, I began covering the one-mile trail to the pasture in record time, and Bud's jaw dropped one day when he saw me sprint out to seize the Register. I had become both very fatigue-proof and very fast.
Of course, I had no idea that my wagon-to-loft circuit training was responsible for transforming me, but transform me it did. Several years ago, when I read a scientific study which linked circuit training with improvements in lactate threshold, I instantly recalled the circuits I carried out for Bud and understood for the first time what had happened to me during that unforgettable summer.
I have been a huge fan of circuits ever since. They are interesting, fun workouts to complete, and the scientific research suggests that - in addition to lifting lactate threshold - circuits may also improve running economy, enhance fatigue-resistance, promote strength, and even volumize vVO2max. With so many positive effects, circuit training is a great way to begin one's overall training program (with about two circuit sessions per week for four to six weeks). Strange as it may seem to many runners, circuits make more sense than just going out and running miles during the early phases of your training.
Yes, I love "wimpy" circuit workouts, during which various parts of the body are tweaked in succession, giving specific muscle groups a bit of a break between challenges. For example, an upper-body exertion might be followed by a lower-body effort, followed by a core maneuver, followed by a running segment, and so on, so that any one group of specific muscles gets some recovery time within each circuit. Such combinations, although somewhat simpering, have certainly been linked with strong advances in fitness, and so we can't throw them away.
However, raw, intense, searing fatigue is one of the very best stimulators of fitness advancement, and so I also love the red-hot circuits which hit a particular muscle group, especially a collection of sinews which are really important for running, over and over again. For example, it's cool to hit squats, followed by lunges, followed by step-ups, followed by squats with presses, followed by a challenging 800-meter run, within a ciruit. Yes, the quads and hammies will protest a lot. But - their cries will turn into sweet music on race day. Their muscle fibers will be packed with mitochondria, buffers, and aerobic enzymes, the kinds of things which make fatigue go away during races. They'll also be controlled by a nervous system which knows how to recruit just the right collections of motor units for efficient running when fatigue is on the near-horizon.
The specific details of circuit training, including the exact exercises to utilize and the numbers of reps and circuits to complete, have been covered in various issues of Running Research News. To learn more about circuit work, simply visit our brand-new web site (see the URL below) and plug the word "circuit" into the Search-Archive box. You'll find the key articles you need to circuit-train properly. And when you PR in an upcoming race after carrying out several weeks of circuit training, please don't thank me - simply offer a benediction to Bud.
P. S. The RRN business office has autorized me to tell you that anyone who spends $100 or more in our new on-line store between now and October 15 will receive, absolutely free, one of our Malibu Running Camp T-Shirts. That's a deal which is hard to pass up, especially since my daughter, Sasha Balfany, designed the shirts so beautifully. The shirts can also be autographed, upon request. To visit the store, simply go to our web site and click on the STORE button. You'll find lots of things to help your running.
Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.
