1 Follow the Leaders Running is a uniquely democratic sport. When you line up at the start of, say, the New York City Marathon as a middle-of-the-pack runner, you are standing on the same bridge (the Verrazzano-Narrows) as the professionals, feeling the same nervous tension they feel and hoping to reach the same finish line in Central Park. Such inclusiveness may also be found at events like the USATF Cross Country Championships, where elite and recreational runners alike have the opportunity to test their fitness on the host course. Even made-for-TV competitions such as the Millrose Games feature races for pros, high school athletes, and club runners of all ages. In running, we''re all in it together in ways that professional and amateur athletes in other sports are not. Away from the racecourse, however, the sport of running is oddly divided. In their training methods, eating habits, recovery methods, and other practices, elite and nonelite runners could scarcely be less alike. The pros do most of their running at low intensity, whereas nonelite runners do most of theirs at moderate intensity.

The pros perform functional strength workouts designed especially to meet the specific needs of runners, whereas nonelite runners are more likely to eschew strength training altogether or do it in forms like CrossFit or yoga that were not developed with runners in mind. The pros typically maintain a balanced, well-rounded, inclusive, and shtick-free diet based on natural foods of all kinds, whereas nonelite runners more often go for elimination-type diets (like keto, plant-based, or Paleo) that are all about exclusion. You get the idea. It almost seems as if nonelite runners are deliberately doing the opposite of everything the elites do, though the reality is that, for reasons Coach Ben and I will get into later, most aren''t even aware of how the pros balance their intensities, strength train, eat, and so forth. As that rare runner who, in a sense, has a foot in both worlds, elite and nonelite, I am keenly aware of this rift. An amateur runner myself, I coach fellow amateurs, but I also interact with the pros through my writing and can use what I learn from them to help my runners and myself improve. It''s a role I was practically born to fulfill. When I was eleven years old, I became both a runner and a fan of professional running in a single moment.

That moment occurred during the 1983 Boston Marathon, when I watched my father complete his first 26.2-miler and saw Joan Benoit record a world-best marathon time for women. My dad''s achievement inspired me to follow in his footsteps and run, while Joan''s admittedly much greater feat moved me to become an active follower of professional running, beginning with local heroes Lynn Jennings, a three-time world champion in cross country, and Cathy Schiro, a national high school cross country champion and Olympian, both of whom lived minutes away from my family''s home in New Hampshire''s seacoast region. It so happened that the coach of the girls'' cross country team at the high school I attended was Jeff Johnson, who held the distinction of having been Nike''s first employee and who''d formerly rubbed elbows with the likes of Steve Prefontaine and the legendary University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman. As a member of the boys'' team, I was never directly coached by Jeff, but he did mentor me to some degree, instilling in me a better understanding of state-of-the-art training principles than most runners my age possessed. If Jeff Johnson wasn''t your typical high school cross country coach, neither was Tom Donnelly your typical Division III running coach. An All-American performer at Villanova University in the 1960s, Tom went on to become the men''s cross country and track coach at tiny Haverford College in Pennsylvania. There, he developed a reputation for turning B-level high school runners like me into collegiate All-Americans while as a side gig also coaching elite runners including Ireland''s Marcus O''Sullivan, a three-time world champion at 1500 meters.

Unfortunately, I didn''t actually run at Haverford, having temporarily burned out on the sport, so Tom''s influence on me, like Jeff''s, was mostly indirect. After graduating in 1993, I took my English degree to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I found a job writing for a newly launched endurance sports magazine. Being immersed in this environment drew me back into running and at the same time afforded me a chance to learn directly from world-class endurance athletes and elite-level coaches. Tour de France cyclist Bob Roll, world champion runner Regina Jacobs (later busted for doping, alas), mountain biker Marla Streb, and triathlon coach Phil Maffetone are just a few of the many luminaries I interviewed and wrote about during this period, and I eagerly applied much of the knowledge I acquired to my own training, racing, and overall lifestyle. By 2001, I felt confident enough in my experience and expertise to start coaching runners and triathletes. Only then did I discover that what seemed obvious to me-that any athlete seeking to get better should take their cues from the champions-wasn''t obvious to everyone. Having been taught early on that athletes at all levels should emulate the pros, I hadn''t realized that most athletes are not so fortunate, hence know little about the methods they use to prepare for races, much less actually practice these methods. For example, whereas professional runners do lengthy, multimodal warm-ups that include activation exercises, jogging, drills, and strides (short, relaxed sprints) prior to their workouts and races, nonelite runners, by and large, warm up with a bit of jogging and nothing more.

In observing such discrepancies, the sociologist in me (I minored in the subject at Haverford) couldn''t help but wonder why amateur runners do just about everything differently from professional runners. The conclusion I''ve arrived at is that, rather than one big reason, there are many small ones. All of them are surmountable, thankfully, and the first step toward doing so and beginning to run like a pro is understanding these reasons. Let''s take that step together now. Reason #1: Most Recreational Runners Are Late Starters In 1983, when my father completed his first Boston Marathon, running was a very different sport than it is today-a lot smaller and a lot more competitive. Back then there were only a few dozen marathons to choose from in the United States, and although Boston was alone in maintaining strict qualifying standards, self-selection ensured that serious racers were the dominant type at all of them. Indeed, to this day the 1983 Boston Marathon remains the fastest marathon ever staged on American soil, with 316 runners finishing the race in less than two hours and thirty minutes. Among those runners was Ben Beach, who finished 236th with a time of 2:27:43.

Ben was typical of the runners of his day. A Maryland native, he started running competitively in high school in the late 1960s, when the first major "running boom" was just getting started. Had he been born a few years earlier, Ben probably would have done what most youth runners did after receiving their diploma, which was to quit the sport. Instead, when Ben moved north to Boston to study medicine at Harvard, he got caught up in the thriving local running culture and chose to continue training and competing, racing his first Boston Marathon as a college freshman in 1968 (and every Boston Marathon since then). If the first running boom served mainly to turn former high school and college runners into adult road racers, the second running boom, which began in the mid 1990s, cast a much wider net, bringing men and women from all sport and fitness backgrounds-and with no background whatsoever-into the fold. Oprah Winfrey''s successful completion of the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon was a watershed moment, opening the door to competitive running to all-comers. This welcome explosion in popularity did not come without a downside, however. Folks who discover running as adults are vulnerable to bad influences in a way that younger starters often are not.

It''s worth noting that the man who coached Oprah to her first (and last) marathon finish, Bob Greene, was a personal trainer who specialized in conditioning for downhill skiing and had no expertise in distance running. Oprah got lucky in choosing a technically unqualified coach who nevertheless did a good job in preparing her for Marine Corps, but all too many adult beginners, not knowing any better, seek guidance from questionable sources that steer them in the wrong direction. The nub of the problem is running''s deceptive simplicity, which leads many people to the mistaken belief that anyone who knows a thing or two about fitness can coach running effectively. If you doubt me, try the following test: Walk into your local CrossFit box and ask the head instructor if he or she can help you train for a marathon. The answer will very likely be yes, and if you follow through on the offer (please don''t), you''ll end up on a program that''s heavy on burpees and light on long runs, which will set you up for an ugly encounter with "the wall" on race day. Those who get an early start in running are far less likely to fall victim to poor guidance. The better middle and high school track programs are, more often than not, coached by men and women who understand that burpees only get you so far as a distance runner. I myself was all of fifteen years old when Jeff Johnson turned me on to Arthur Lydiard, the.