During my excursions this past holiday in Ohio, I came across this really cute GM vehicle, the Chevrolet HHR – good carrying capacity, good fuel economy, peppy action and oh wait, what’s this…

A window sticker that was not added by the owner and it didn’t read “California, Get a Life”, “Obama ’09″ or something similar.

Upon closer examination, I realized it was a warning to those who would carry things on the roof of this car. Immediately, my mind thought of the three bike racks and wheel holders that I have on top of my truck. Consider what must have prompted GM to put this sticker on their car in the first place and who is typically buying this vehicle?

• a) a bunch of triathletes or cyclists with Yakima or Thule racks
• b) a bunch of hunters trying to tie dead animals to the roof of their vehicles
• c) the Beverly Hillbillies
• d) teenage highway surfers
• e) all of the above

Let me know you’re thoughts.

The two most important things I can do as a consultant are to listen and to ask questions. As I do in other facets of my life, I try to take a Zen approach to my consulting. What that means is that I acknowledge that the clients with whom I work know their business far better than I ever will and my primary purpose is helping them to surface solutions that they in most cases already know but for a variety of reasons have either not accepted or have buried beneath layers of bureaucracy, political power struggles or corporate noise – the naysayers, and the “it’s always been done this way” mantra that is so pervasive in corporate America today.

Never was this made more apparent than during the conversations that I had this Thanksgiving weekend in the heartland of the automotive crisis with family and friends who have worked for GM directly (some for more than thirty years), third party suppliers and even a local steel mill where the hinges are made for their car and truck doors.

I love going back there because it provides a healthy dose of reality and diversity from the Los Angeles and Manhattan experience that has become my daily life. It’s always eye opening when you speak to intelligent people who live and breathe what I only read about or see through the lens of the national media. Now, I did grow up in a union friendly town, but the Screen Actors Guild, the DGA and the WGA never really seemed like real unions to me, you know the kinds with supposed mafia ties and bent nosed organizers. I mean seriously, my classmate Melissa Gilbert was the president of SAG, and I hardly can see little Laura Ingalls in the same light as Jimmy Hoffa. In truth I actually was a union member myself at one point when I worked at a local grocery store during college. Again, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the impact of that union; all I remember is that they called taxes dues and the triple time I got for working on Christmas and New Years never seemed to offset the regular hits to my meager bi-weekly paycheck.

Ohio in contrast is the real deal. People bleed for the unions out there. These are down to earth, uncomplicated steel workers, auto workers, and food workers. You name it and there’s a union to support it out there. It took me a good many years to shed the stereotyped image that I had been brought up with of these types of union workers – entitled, inflexible, overpaid and lazy.

Given the current financial climate, I couldn’t have picked a better time to be held in the bosom of the UAW. The first thing I noticed was that these members aren’t at all like those stereotypes, they aren’t digging in their heels about what they’re entitled to and they do in fact have a terrific handle on the current realities of the automotive crisis. Two evenings spent with them provided me with more relevant and valuable insight than all of the recent Face the Nation and WSJ reports.

Again as a consultant, our clients want us to bring relevant experience across multiple dimensions and different circumstances facing their industry. The people whom I spoke with this weekend have all of that and more, as these folks have lived lives not exclusively based on the current climate or even the recent past. They saw Chrysler go into and out of bankruptcy and they saw how and why it was successful. They lived through the 1979 union concessions as well as the negotiations and deals with GM management where promises were made but never delivered. Now I’m not naïve enough to think that any of our current auto industry problems are because of a single constituency but I have to tell you that the issues they identified and the solutions they suggested made a whole lot of sense to me and I’ll add that nothing that they talked about included unilateral actions without a shared responsibility by all parties. They really do understand that they are all in this together, management, unions, shareholders, suppliers and car owners. Not once did I ever see them point fingers except to say that none of what they were saying seemed to be heard. This is where a consultant can come in real handy because often an out of town expert with the briefcase is able to communicate the same message in a slightly different way to have it more readily heard and acted upon. That said, what I’m suggesting is that if this group is representative of the quality of GM workers and stakeholders, you already have an army of intelligent and insightful consultants to choose from.

Change is an interesting animal in that most everyone agrees to it in concept, but history, biases, motives and a lack of trust can create incredible resistance to doing anything meaningful to improve performance. Denial and hubris can be incredibly powerful forces and extremely difficult to overcome. Such is the case with GM. Why else would you fly to Congress to ask them for financial support without a plan and on a corporate jet. Who was advising these folks? Having had experience positioning our own firm’s leadership for prior Congressional hearings facing our industry, I can tell you that there is nothing more offensive than the non verbal cues associated with denial and hubris. True change begins with the willingness to have an honest dialogue with those who matter most, your customers and your people. I wonder if GM will ever take this incredibly important step. If they did, I bet that they’d find that their own people have all of the answers they need to address the two paramount objectives for this industry, increasing consumer demand for their cars, and sustainable cost reduction.

As one worker told me so eloquently, “when your own people don’t want to buy your products, you really have a problem”.

This Sunday is the Philadelphia Marathon and since we have a handful of our runners that will be out there qualifying for The Boston Marathon, I thought I’d add a few quick tips and reminders that are applicable to anyone contemplating running for time during a cold weather race.

First and foremost, keep in mind that if you are targeting a time goal, you’ll want to not overdress. Ounces of extra weight can cost minutes over 3-4 hours of running. Take some time to loosen up outside the morning before the race and even the morning of the race to get a better understanding of just what you’ll need. Bring clothes that you can ultimately throw away and if you have a sherpa on the course, provide them with what you might need and where (e.g., gloves, and extra hat, perhaps a thin jacket or vest in case the conditions change). Treat wind and cold differently. Cold can be addressed with a thin long-sleeved top but wind will cut through that and may require a very lightweight vest that you’ll need to zip up to reduce wind resistance.

For me, the most important three items you can wear are running gloves, a buff and a beenie-type hat. Even if I wear running shorts and a singlet, I’ll at least start out with these three items because if your fingers, ears and nose get cold, they can just plain hurt. And keeping heat from escaping from your head is always a good idea. These three items should be the last things you peel off or throw away. This also brings up another point, wear throw away clothes and make sure they really are clothes that you feel comfortable discarding. Wearing a jacket or windpants to start and then tying them around your waist is fine if you have an “I just want to finish” goal, but the extra weight and wind resistance created by these is unacceptable when seconds can separate you from a trip to Boston in April.

Stay as warm as possible in the corrals before the start, and make sure you can get your clothes off easily over your Garmin, any other gadgets, and your shoes as soon as your temperature rises. Don’t even think about “What if I bonk and get cold because I’ll slow down, what will I do?”. If you have a BQ time goal, if you bonk, you bonk. Head to the nearest aid station to get warm or use your mental fortitude to push past the bad patch in the race and warm yourself by running faster.  This is also where you’ll be happy you had the three items listed above.

For more tips and a chart to help you know what to wear under different running conditions, check out our Picking Your Running Wardrobe: Choosing the right clothes for the conditions article in the Team Training Room at www.racewithpurpose.org.  Good luck out there and we’ll see you in Boston!

What people wear during a marathon has always been an interest of mine both from a performance standpoint and because I, like everyone else, enjoys to be entertained. Each year in NYC, we anxiously wait for both Larry the Lighthouse, who runs the entire marathon as a ten foot lighthouse promoting the NJ Marathon, and Mr. Testicles, who runs as a pair of testicles to promote awareness of testicular cancer. In both of these cases, these runners are, well, racing with purpose – promoting the cause or event most important to them.

On Sunday, this guy was the person most referenced after the race. What his purpose is, I have no idea, but I am open to suggestions.

For your enjoyment, here are the original links to the Flickr Photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/54421714@N00/2999529449/

http://flickr.com/photos/54421714@N00/2999529399/

You already have the tools you need to run a truly amazing race. You’ve trained well, you’ve tapered well, you’ve eaten well. Since you can’t control weather or financial collapse, the focus should be on what you can control. Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll show up ready to run your best marathon. Here are a few reminders of what you should do (and what you shouldn’t) during your marathon week.

Behaviors to avoid:
1) Over-eating for comfort. Throw out the candy, clean out the refrigerator and make sure you have a good supply of healthy snacks on hand this week. Nervous eating accompanies nervous energy. Bananas are a particularly good food to have on hand as a nutritional alternative, which will directly benefit your running.

2) Looking for that magic pill by trying something new. The marathon expo can be an entertaining experience with lots of tantalizing products and services, all claiming to guarantee success on Sunday. Don’t buy it. Literally. If you want a souvenir, it’s fine to buy something for use after the marathon. Nothing that you buy at the expo should be used on race day unless you forgot to pack gloves, Body Glide, or nip guards before you left.

3) Losing focus after the race begins. If during the race you find yourself succumbing to your emotions and flying down the first descents, imagine a coach grabbing your collar from behind to gently remind you to hold yourself back. The excitement can be overwhelming. Keep it together.

Even if the love of your life and your soul mate passes you early on, as the saying goes, let them go. Adding a marathon spin to this phrase, you’ll catch them during the last 10K. Focus on running your own race. If someone you are running with or a pace group member goes rogue, suggest once that they should pull back. If they don’t, just let them go. Don’t be too hard on them when you pass them farther along on the course. Focus on your own race and do what you came here to do. Wear and set your own watch!

Behaviors to seek out:
1) Know the course. Spend a few minutes going through all of the available tools such as this interactive course map for this year’s Chicago Marathon. Visualize every mile marker, bridge, water stop and aid station, and where your family and friends will be. By knowing all of these things in advance you will reduce unnecessary anxiety. Notice the camber of the street, the angle of the hills, and the wind on the bridges. Then realize that none of these are any different than the conditions in which you have trained. After you’ve done this, stop thinking. Just let your mind go blank. There’s nothing more for you to think about. You are prepared!

2) Plan your run and run your plan. Maintain discipline and consistency. This is no different than the message you should have received during the first week of your training. Race day is not a time to get creative but it is a time to flexible, tolerant and patient. If you’ve trained with Race with Purpose, you have been trained to Commute, Warm-Up & Race. All that is left is to execute this plan. During this last week, don’t begin to mentally shave seconds off of your Commute Pace to try and hit a specific time goal. Remember, your Commute Pace is the most important pace of the run. Do it right and you will feel strong and empowered as you run your final 10K. Blow it and you will be like any other marathoner out there struggling through an excuse known as “the wall.” Your Commute is run at a pace at which you will run no faster, not a pace that you will try to stay close to. It flexes to keep your effort level constant. If you have been training for a 4-hour goal, you are not going to switch from 9:15′s to 9:00′s on race day. Even a 10 second acceleration of Commute Pace will only serve to guarantee your inability to Race at mile 20. Remind yourself that you are here to Race a 10K. Nothing else matters.

You have trained for this in real conditions, not in a laboratory. You have trained in heat, wind, cold, and rain. There is nothing that you will need to overcome on race day except your own negative thoughts. Turn it positive and you have nothing left to do but succeed.

3) Visualize your success. Every evening before going to sleep, see yourself standing at the start with your teammates. Then visualize yourself smiling and laughing with each other as you run along the course. Who will you look at when you hit the 16-mile marker, realizing that your Warm-Up is about to begin? What will you say to the other members of your running group when you enter the beginning of your 10K feeling strong and race ready?

Look at yourself right now. How do you look as you cross the finish line? Think of how you will answer each of these questions, and then relax and smile to yourself and be content with your preparation.

On race day, you will see all of the same faces that you have met along your journey and some smiling new ones. You have worked extremely hard to get to this point. This race is not your final exam but your victory lap. All of your coaches, teammates, friends, family, and spectators will be out on the course with one purpose: to celebrate your success. This race is your graduation ceremony. You’ve already earned all of the credits.

The second gunman on the grassy knoll? Maybe? Maybe not. Explore with me the facts of one professional’s humbling experience and come to your own conclusion about whether this group here had anything to do with it.

From left to right are super triathletes and TriScoopers Moonpie (I’m ripped), HolisticGuru (Is there quinoa in this drink?), Strouter (I’m not drunk, I used to be), Rambonie (I’m finding about my nature) and CindyJo (Yes, I have multiples of this grateful dead t-shirt, so back off).

To begin this story, let’s work our way back to July 19th when Desiree herself posted this on her blog:

Good morning everyone! I have been a little tardy with my journaling and I still have all the nasty details in my head from Ironman CDA so I will have to come back to that one….

I am about to go jump in the lake out here in Lake Placid, NY. It is the day before the race and I am optimistic that I will come back from the mistakes I made a few weeks ago and have a solid race. There is some great competition up here this weekend and the hilly course is a feat to conquer in itself. We have thunderstorms for the last two days so hopefully those will hold off for us until the run portion. A rain shower on the run always feels nice.

At that point Desiree was looking like this:

At some point between lunch and dinner our mild mannered TriScoopers were innocently day drinking at Charlie’s, a popular hangout on Main Street in Lake Placid, when in walked Desiree Ficker. According to witnesses, Desiree walked up to the host and asked to obtain food, fuel, sustenance and necessary nutrition for her upcoming race. Before Moonpie could jump up to invite her over to the table, the host had apparently ignored this professional triathlete’s pleas for food (Think Oliver holding his bowl out) and sent her on her way. Where she went, no one seems to know but as you can read from her blog entry above, she was still in a very fragile state of mind and the denial of food only contributed to her performance on race day. How poor was her performance you ask? Here is a quote from Ironman Live:

Desiree Ficker gets across the line
“She hasn’t had much luck at this race, has she. Desiree Ficker isn’t one to quit, though — she walked her way across the line here today, as she did three years ago.

Our spotters just told me that when they saw her she was shaking and her lips were blue at the turnaround.

It obviously wasn’t her day, but she certainly toughed this one out!”

In my mind, this couldn’t be any simpler. Charlie’s is directly responsible for Desiree’s poor performance. At the same time, the host was summarily dismissing her, our TriScoopers were being offered another round of drinks ON THE HOUSE. Why, you ask? Obviously to distract them from helping out this poor athlete.

By favoring the intoxicated TriScoopers over this professional athlete, they virtually guaranteed that Desiree would bonk during the marathon the following day. Did Moonpie bonk? NO! Did CindyJo bonk? NO! In fact, Nathan Miller (not pictured here) beat Desiree by fifteen minutes on the run and he clearly has the means to compensate the owners of Charlie’s to act like they didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know who she was? RIGHT! Please take a look at the picture above and tell me that you wouldn’t remember her face. So the question remains, did Charlie’s act on their own, or was there an outside influence that contributed to this unconscionable act?

I’m not saying that there was a conspiracy here but I think that the truth needs to come out. Desiree needs to be vindicated and at the least Charlie’s owes Desiree a pitcher of margueritas on the house.

It turns out that “biological engines” — which is what the muscles in your body are — are pretty amazing in terms of efficiency. To find out how efficient, let’s look at how many calories a person burns while riding a bicycle.

If you look at a page like this calorie chart, you will find that a person riding a bicycle at 15 miles per hour (24 km per hour) burns 0.049 calories per pound per minute. So a 175-pound (77-kg) person burns 515 calories in an hour, or about 34 calories per mile (about 21 calories per km).

A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter). Considering that a normal car gets about 30 miles per gallon, that’s pretty impressive!

To be fair, keep in mind that a car generally weighs a ton or more, while a bicycle weighs only 30 pounds. Cars also travel a lot faster than 15 mph. But it is still an interesting comparison. Note also that people cannot drink gasoline. However, people can drink vegetable oil, which contains nearly the same number of calories per gallon (if you look at How Fats Work you can see that fat contains long hydrogen/carbon chains just like gasoline does).

The people riding in a race like the Tour de France are riding more like 25 mph. Because air resistance rises very quickly with speed, they are burning about three times more calories — something like 100 calories per mile. In a 100-mile stage of the tour, a racer might burn something like 8,000 to 10,000 calories in one day! So they are getting only about 300 miles per gallon. The only way to replace those calories is to eat a lot of food

So like every good coach, I submersed myself in data until I found the data that I liked the most and here it is. Forget Avi’s stellar 2:51 Boston Marathon finish where he knocked off 19 minutes from his former personal best, while at the same time setting two half marathon PR’s in the same race, with a 1:26 in the first half and then a 1:25 in the second. I have found out that I will die when I am 89.9 years old, barring getting hit by a car while running or cycling. More importantly, I’m going to be healthy until I’m 74.1 years old which means that I can almost walk the marathon and still qualify as the qualifying time for a male between the age of 70 – 74 is 4 hours 30 minutes. Whoooohoooo. I might even get JetPack and Rambo to run it with me at that pace.

This test also told me that I’ve banked 11.4 years although I’m not quite sure how that works since it says that I am right now the equivalent of a 37.5 year old, which is roughly 6 years younger than my actual age. They also tell me that I can add 5.5 more years to my life, but since I’ve already banked 11.4, I’m saying “No Deal” Mr. Banker. I can get more than that 5.5 years all on my own just by watching less reality television. I firmly believe that watching The Hills sucks life out of you. Rock of Love, on the other hand, can only help to stimulate healthy living.

My one concern is what will I be like between age 74.1 and 89.9? Will I be drooling or in a wheelchair? That’s a long time for my life to suck, which is another reason, I’m not anxious to live longer, I’m anxious to live healthier longer. I guess the moral of the story is that as long as I stay under 5 hours for a marathon, I’ll once again be able to run in that great race. Time to go swim with the BQers at the JCC. There’s probably a few wrinkly guys over there I can coach down to that 5 hour time limit.

Can we replace “fit back into your skinny jeans” with PR in many conversations? As in:

“Hey I saw you at the race yesterday, you looked great. Did you….[fit back into your skinny jeans] / [PR]?”

For the completely unidoctrinated, PR means personal record and it is used to quantify when you have raced a certain distance faster than you ever have before. By definition, your first race at any distance is a personal record, so the term is usually reserved for the second and future attepts where the record is broken – where you swim, bike or run faster than you ever have before.

In reality, taking endurance sport out of it, for most people, PR’s hang like those favorite pair of jeans in your closet that no longer fit you for a variety of reasons but you don’t want to donate to the shelter, because you truly believe that some day you’ll be able to fit into them again.

How you’ll ever get back into those jeans again is an entirely different matter. For some it requires focus and discipline, for others all this does is create endless frustration as you see yorself slipping further and further away from your ability to EVER fit back into those jeans. As Bill Murray said “And then depression sets in.”

Well the good news is that you don’t necessarily need to join the Army to find PR or fit salvation. Sometimes, for the oddest of reasons you simply put the jeans on and they just fit. You didn’t necessarily focus on them, you may have even forgotten that they were in your closet. You didn’t get all anxious and you really didn’t overtly do anything significantly different than you did before, it was just that for some reason, your behaviors changed, perhaps and maybe because of having nothing to do with a desire to fit back into those jeans. And then one day you come across them while cleaning out your closet and think, “Hey, what the heck, let’s give those a try” and wouldn’t you know it, they just fit.

What an amazing feeling!

One of our Race with Purpose runners recently PR’d at the half marathon distance during the More Marathon in Central Park this past weekend. K.C. is a runner that I have had the honor of actually pacing through a half marathon. She is a very good runner that quite possibly could be a great runner. She’s already running a 1:37 half marathon. She’s quintesentially focused, and driven, and determined and all of the other essential characteristics that go along with all of those self-help or how to run your best marathon books, based on the hard work will pay off philosophy. But this past weekend, she PR’d and her first response when asked how she did it was: “You’re not going to like it; I haven’t been running all that much and I just sort of went out and ran without focusing on the outcome.” Wouldn’t you know it, she PR’d in the process. She just reached into her closet and pulled out those pair of skinny jeans, tried them on and found out that not only did she fit into them, but she had room to spare.

Now for the procrastinators out there reading this, this may sound like great news. It’s right up there with the selective interpretation of the 90′s where everyone was saying, “Don’t work out so hard, you’ll just be burning carbohydrates.” “If you want to maximize fat catabolism, slow down.” Taken to the extreme, you had people saying, “the best and most efficient way for me to burn fat is to lay in bed or watch television.” Yes, by doing this, you will be most certainly burning a high percentage of fat, but 90% of nothing over a 2 hour investment of time is still nothing. All that is efficiency in pursuit of ineffectiveness.

There is a public company that we work with who’s HR department has been trying to implement healthy lifestyle and wellness opportunities into their benefits programs. They are pretty progressive and they have a mostly blue collar workforce. Some of their programs are successful, other’s not so much, which is why they asked us to help them. The people managing the program have a test of relevance and impact for the various programs they implement. The test is very simple and is described as whether or not the program contributes to their employees’ GOYFA, which if you don’t know already stands for Get Off Your Fat Ass. If a benefit program results in a positive GOYFA, they keep it, if it doesn’t, then they discard it. Bet you didn’t know your company’s HR department was thinking of you in these terms. Bottom line, no pun intended, this is a very basic measure that doesn’t need sophisticated tools or science; you either are or you’re not GOYFA.

So for the uninspired, for those that lack follow through, or dedication, if you want to fit back into your skinny jeans, or achieve a PR, maybe the first thing to do is forget the science, forget the theories and simply GOYFA. For the already OCD members of our endurance community for whom GOYFA is clearly not a problem, perhaps you should consider the lesson learned from K.C., that maybe the best way to fit back into that PR, or into those pair of skinny jeans in the closet is just to forget about them both for awhile. Enjoy life and live in the moment. How did K.C. put it? “It’s all about the Power of Now!”

More to follow…

Thanks to Spiderman Eugene for filming this at the beginning of last season. No animals were harmed in the making of this video, however many of the cows are nowhere to be found. Grrrrrr