Runner Spotlight - Bettina Collins

Favorite distance:

My favorite distance is the Half Marathon Distance. I have run every distance from 5k to marathon, but I love the half marathon distance the most. Especially after my back surgery in 2014. After that, the half marathon distance was a distance I felt was challenging enough to  to still allow me to feel like a distance runner without causing me any major issues with my back. It also allowed me to still have time to enjoy life and other activities as well. It keeps my life balanced in a sense.

Do you have any running/walking advice you'd like to offer?:

As a running coach, there are so many pieces of advice I try to offer, mostly because I don’t want people, especially new runners, to have to learn things the hard way like I did when I first started out.

In this instance, I think one of the best pieces I can offer today, especially to new runners, is to keep showing up. Even when it feels too hard or impossible, just keep showing up. Keep showing up to your group runs, solo runs and races (both virtual and in person), and most importantly for yourself. The more you show up in life, not just in running, the more you will accomplish greatness in all you do. Running is hard, but we are stronger than our biggest hurdles in life as long as we just keep showing up.

And for new runners and experienced runners I think it’s important to remember to give back to the running community in some way. Don’t just register for races, but also volunteer and work an aid station, help clean up, and support your fellow runners. Or if there’s not a local running group where you live, start one. Bring people together and create a community of people working to live better, healthier lives and spread positivity.

Volunteering at a race is also a great way to check out a new distance from afar. If there’s a distance you are thinking about trying out, but aren’t sure about it, volunteering at a race offering that distance will give you a peek at what it’s like to actually run it.

Finally, for all those beginning runners/walkers out there, one very practical piece of advice I like to give is to get fitted for the right running shoes! Go to a local running store (not a big box sporting goods store or department store) and have your gait analyzed and get fitted for the right shoes for your feet and your gait. Running starts from the feet up and having the right shoes will help prevent injury and long term issues. The right shoes can also improve your form and pace as well. In general, the right shoes make you a much better and stronger runner!

Why do you like running River City Races events?:

I love River City Races because they are local, family friendly races that bring the Louisville Running Community together. The atmosphere at their events is fun and festive and laid back and inclusive. Everyone one is welcome including walkers and their swag is always the best!

Anything else you'd like to share?:

Running is the thing that changed my life almost 20 years ago. I’ve gone away from it at times but have always come back to it and it made me the athlete I never was when I was growing up. I found it in my mid twenties and it has always been a constant in my life even during my times away from it.

I’ve struggled with many things in my life including obesity (yes I was still a runner even at my heaviest weight), degenerative disc disease and chronic pain, and major back surgery, but in 2017 I finally decided to change the way I look at life and how I lived. I changed how I ate, got back to running regularly and lost 70 pounds. I worked on my mindset about my pain, and re-evaluated everything about my life. And now I have taken everything I have learned and used it to become a certified holistic health coach and running coach (I am also a Registered Nurse) and I work with people like me who have struggled with weight gain and chronic pain conditions.

I started my own company earlier this year called The Joyful Running Company (joyfulrunning.com) to combine both my health coaching and running coaching services and to become a Race Director myself (I am currently hosting my first charity virtual race series called the Find Your Joy Race Series), with the hope of directing in person races once quarantine is over. It is my goal to spread the joy of running and living a healthy lifestyle to as many people as I can and to give back to my community any way I can. We only get one go at this life, so I plan to make mine count.

Thank you River City Races for nominating me for the Runner Spotlight and for all you do for the running community. You helped me so many years ago when I first started and it’s my goal to do the same for others as well! Thank you for being a staple in our running community over the years and for all the wonderful memories. They will never be forgotten! Now let’s go for a run!

-Coach Tina

tina@joyfulrunning.com

website: joyfulrunning.com

Runner Spotlight - Anup Gupta

Favorite distance: 5k.

It is one of the easiest distance for me to run. I can wake up any day and do a 5K as it needs the minimum to no training time to jump on a 5K race.

Do you have any running/walking advice you'd like to offer?

Dreams remain dreams until you take action - if you want to become healthy and a regular runner, take action. Start with small steps, be consistent. Try to go out 2-3 days a week outdoors.

A narrow focus brings big results. The number one reason people give up so fast is because they tend to look at how far they still have to go instead of how far they have come. But it's a series of small wins that can give us the most significant success.

I learnt it the hard way, don’t overtrain. Overtraining may result into injuries. Trust your instincts and watch out for the signals that your body is giving, include sufficient rest in your training plan or running habits.

Why do you like running River City Races events?

I love River City Races because it offers races for people at different level of fitnesses. With different distances to choose from, one can pick the races that fits their fitness level, can challenge themselves for a longer distance or train for a mini/full marathon . Also the fact that it is local, it is always less crowded than any commercial events. I finished ‘Run The 502’ series of six runs in 2018 and Polar Bear Grand Pix.

Anything else you'd like to share?

I was never into regular running or participating in races in past. Although I played soccer regularly in my high school days that included running as part of training. I used to hate that part of the training. I think, I still hate running :) When my friends and family ask me about why I run - more often than not I say “I run because I hate to run. And I love to do what I hate to do!”. That doesn’t always make sense to few people but that’s my own way of pushing myself to get what seems difficult at the beginning.

I started running regularly from the last 3 years and still consider myself a newbie in running. My running journey started from neighborhood runs to park runs to races. Small races, number of 5Ks, 10Ks, 15K and finally my first half marathon *KY History Mini Marathon” in 2019. Its a great feeling to cross the finish line in any races be it small or a marathon. I regret that I still couldn’t do the KY Derby mini which is one of the very popular marathon in Louisville. I signed up and missed it in 2019 due to injuries. Again signed up, going to miss it this year as the race is cancelled (damn you Covid-19). Hope to be able to participate in 2021. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my wife (Aditi) and 3 year old son (Ahaan) for being supportive even though I take time away from the family time to go outdoors for regular runs and races.

Louisville has a great running community and it is great to see so many familiar faces in the River City Races. When we get back to normal, Hope to see everyone out and running in River City Races. Keep doing the great job in organizing the Races. Cheers!

Why Endurance Athletes Feel Less Pain

by Alex Hutchinson for Outside Online

While researching a book on endurance a few years ago, I interviewed a German scientist named Wolfgang Freund who had recently completed a study on the pain tolerance of ultra-endurance runners. Subjects in the study had to hold their hands in ice water for as long as possible. The non-athlete control group lasted an average of 96 seconds before giving up; every single one of the runners, in contrast, made it to the three-minute safety cut-off, at which point they rated the pain as a mere 6 out of 10 on average.

The results were consistent with previous research showing that athletes can tolerate more pain than non-athletes. But not all sports impose the same demands, Freund pointed out: “Maradona, at least, had the illusion that a brilliant soccer player didn’t need to suffer.” As a runner myself, I liked the implication that endurance athletes are uniquely tough, so I happily included that quote in my book. But is it really true?

As it happens, researchers at Norway’s University of Tromsø tackled exactly that question, along with several other interesting ones, in a recent study in Frontiers in Psychology. They compared 17 national-level soccer players with 15 elite endurance athletes (cross-country skiers and runners, also “competing at the highest national level in Norway”) and 39 non-athlete controls in three pain tests. They also administered a series of psychological questionnaires to explore what traits are associated with greater pain tolerance.

The first pain test was the same one used in Freund’s study: dunking the hand in barely-above-freezing water for as long as possible (again with a three-minute cut-off, though the subjects weren’t told about it in advance). On average, the endurance athletes lasted 179.67 seconds (meaning virtually all of them made it to three minutes, with the exception of one person who stopped five seconds early). The control group averaged 116.78 seconds, and the brilliant soccer players just 113.90 seconds.

This was exactly what the researchers expected. After all, embracing open-ended discomfort is exactly what endurance athletes do every day in training, so it makes sense that they have a high pain tolerance. But pain threshold—the point at which a sensation goes from unpleasant to painful—might be different. Soccer players, like other team sport athletes, experience briefer spikes of pain associated with “short bouts of supramaximal intensity and receiving blows from opponents or the ball,” the researchers point out. As a result, they hypothesized that the experience of this more intense pain would give soccer players a higher pain threshold than endurance athletes.

To test pain threshold, they applied a heated aluminum thermode to the inner forearm of the subjects, starting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit and slowly increasing to a maximum of 126 degrees. The subjects had to press a button when the sensation changed from warmth to pain, and this process was repeated five times. This time, contrary to their hypothesis, the soccer players and endurance athletes were essentially the same, at 117.7 and 118.2 degrees, and both were significantly higher than the non-athletes at 115.8 degrees. (Those numbers are from the first test; when the test was repeated a second time, the numbers were slightly higher but the pattern was the same.)

The third test looked at yet another aspect of pain response, pain sensitivity. While pain is fundamentally a subjective experience, pain sensitivity tries to quantify how intensely you feel a given stimulus. It’s obviously related to both threshold and tolerance, but it’s not identical: one person might feel pain very intensely but nonetheless be willing to tolerate it for longer than someone else who feels it less intensely. To measure sensitivity, the temperature of the heated thermode was ramped up to 117.5 degrees for 30 seconds, and participants had to rate their pain on a scale of 0 to 100. The researchers expected no difference between the soccer players and the endurance athletes. Instead, the average pain scores for the first test were 45.5 out of 100 for the endurance athletes, 51.9 for the soccer players, and 59.4 for the non-athletes. In the second test, the scores were 37.9, 45.4, and 53.7. The differences aren’t statistically significant, but there’s a pretty suggestive trend.

There are two big questions here. One is why the three groups have different perceptions of pain; the other is whether the athletes were born with these differences, or whether they acquired them as a result of their training. The most widely held view is that the big differences are psychological, as opposed to some sort of physiological dulling of pain sensors. In this study, the researchers assessed the subjects’ “Big Five” psychological traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), and gave separate questionnaires to assess grit and fear of pain.

The results are a little convoluted, given that there are seven psychological traits, three groups, and three pain perception outcomes. Both grit and conscientiousness had a bit of predictive power on some outcomes, which isn’t surprising since some critics argue that grit is basically just a fancy repackaging of the older concept of conscientiousness. The one psychological characteristic that predicted all three outcomes was fear of pain, which makes sense. But there were no statistically significant differences between the three groups in their average fear of pain scores, though the endurance group seemed to have slightly better (i.e. less fearful) scores. That means it can’t be the main reason the three groups scored differently on the pain tests.

As for the second question on nature versus nurture, this study can’t answer it. There have been some hints in previous studies that pain tolerance is a trainable trait, and that endurance training is one way of enhancing it. On the other hand, I’d be surprised if there isn’t some element of athletes being “chosen by their sport” in part based on pre-existing psychological attributes like willingness to suffer. The new study adds fear of pain to the list of relevant psychological attributes, alongside others from previous research like tendency to catastrophize (bad) and ability to ignore negative feelings (good).

It seems to me that we’re unlikely to find one neat mental trick that distinguishes pain gluttons from pain avoiders. Instead, successful athletes likely have an array of different mental tactics for dealing with different types of discomfort in different contexts. Teasing out the best strategies is a great topic for future research. But to be honest, it’s all a digression from the main point I wanted to emphasize from this paper—which is that Wolfgang Freund was right.

For more Sweat Science, join me on Twitter and Facebook, sign up for the email newsletter, and check out my book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.

Runner Spotlight - Ali Faraji-Tajirishi

Growing up in Florida, running was not my sport. I was on my school’s track and cross-country team, but I did that mostly to stay in shape for soccer. I would sporadically run in college but was never training for a race. It wasn’t until I trained for my first marathon, during an engineering internship in Louisville, that I became a runner in my mind. Running a marathon was more of a bucket list check than anything else. I had never trained for a race by myself, and went into it a little unprepared. I set out for my first long run down Southern Parkway to Iroquois. This was before I had a GPS watch or even the forethought to try to map out a route. I was so enthralled with the beautiful scenery and exploring Iroquois that by the time I got back to my apartment, I had run 18 miles! A few months later, I was in the corral for the Derby Marathon, overwhelmed by the scenes of race day. I ended up finishing that marathon a lot faster than expected (3:07:30), being driven by the crowds lining the street cheering on complete strangers.

Once I moved to Louisville full time, I started to find and get involved more with the running community. Regularly doing the Triple Crown and other local races, I’ve gotten to know a lot of other runners and been encouraged to keep pushing myself to improve. Taking advice and hearing other people’s stories, I’ve been able to build my own training plans and improve my race times every year since.

I was able to qualify and run in the Boston Marathon in 2018 and found the Louisville running community all over again. It was great to see familiar faces throughout Boston in the days leading up to the race and before the race in Hopkinton. Finishing the Boston marathon in the pouring wind and rain, was one of the happiest moments of my life and has only stoked my running passion.

I was so excited about running, I got my then girlfriend into it as well. She also used to be a soccer player, but is now a runner! We got married last summer and I made sure to include a pre-wedding morning run with one of my groomsmen. Other than running, we love going to Louisville City soccer games and playing with our two cats, Joule and Purkinje (Unfortunately, the cats are not interested in running).

Last year, I got the opportunity to team up with some amazing runners to start the Swag’s Elite Team. It’s been awesome to be on a team again, cheering on and having friendly competitions with each other. With their support, I was able to win the Urban Bourbon Half Marathon last year with a new personal record of 1:14:55. A few weeks later, I got to see the Louisville running community once again in Indy for the Monumental Marathon. We had a large group of Louisville runners rolling at around 6:00 pace through the first half of the race. I ended up finishing in 2:39:38 for my second personal record of the training cycle.

I like to think Louisville and the people here have really made me a runner. So these last couple of weeks have been pretty tough. Sure I still can run. I can still tackle the hills near Turkey Run, see the deer jumping through the woods near Indian Hills, see the sunrise on the walking bridge, run by the farms in Anchorage. But what I really miss is the 6AM group runs from Seneca or lining up on Main Street with thousands of other runners for the Derby races. You never miss something until it’s gone, and Louisville runners, I’ve missed you.

So when this is all over, let’s go for a run.

More On Running With Your Dog

by Jeremy Allen from Colorado Runner Magazine

Colorado Runner recently posted an article on running with your dog. As someone who has logged many miles, especially during the Great Colorado Sign Challenge as Team Pitsky, I had a few tips to add. Disclaimer: I’m just a runner that runs a lot of miles with his pups. I’m not a dog trainer.

1) Begin the running routine with brief/easy runs on a grassy surface, such as a soccer pitch. Start with a few runs of 400-800 meters so both of you can work on the mechanics of running together.

2) Include a variety of surfaces and terrain so the pup can get used to how it feels and looks. It also allows you to train the pup to stay on trails/sidewalks/single-track. If most runs are on a sidewalk, practice leaving and returning to the sidewalk by running in the street. This is helpful to avoid obstacles that you encounter on the sidewalks and for an easy and safe transition between the sidewalk/street. I had trained our youngest to run on the sidewalks and we initially avoided the streets. When we had to leave the sidewalk she would pull to return to the sidewalk instead of letting me lead the run. I had to re-train her to run on both.

3) Carry water and a collapsible water bowl for the pup, especially any run that is over 4 miles. I’ll typically provide a water break after the first 1.5/2 miles and every .75/1 mile afterward.

4) Be patient and accept that a pup “knows” their limitations. While we may be fixated on Strava segments, a specific pace range, or certain distances, if a pup needs a break it will usually stop where it wants to stop, especially if it is warm. Enjoy the break, let the pup recover and take time to appreciate the smiles the pup brings to folks passing by.

5) I agree with planning the routes in advance. I’ve mapped out routes that include shaded, grassy spots at certain “mile markers”. It provides the pup a comfortable spot to recover and cool off, as well as a familiar spot for them to sniff and catch up on canine happenings in the neighborhood. I’ve also selected spots that allow for a run to shortened or extended depending on weather or the pup’s demeanor.

6) Learn to run with your pup before bringing them to a group or club run. If you decide to run with a group with your pup, show up early so the pup can get used to the surroundings. I’ve learned that my pups tend to start a group run like most 10-year-old kids at their first 5K… they kick it at the start and fade after a few minutes. I tend to start 5 minutes before the group so they can get the energy surge out of their system and settle into a steady pace. It is also safer for the other runners as we’ve not weaving in between everyone at the start.

7) If you’re going to race with your pup, start with smaller races and expect to be slower than without a pup (they don’t care about the podium.) Take wider turns and try to stay away from others. You don’t want to impede others and be the owner that gets dogs banned from future events. (Another race tip: Easy jog ½ to 1 mile before the race with your pup. I’ve found this encourages them to relieve themselves before the actual race.)

8) Equipment: I agree with the hands-free approach. I use a musher belt (custom made by Leashes By Liz, a local company), a 5-foot leash, and a harness. Along with the fastener on the belt, Liz installed D rings on both sides of the buckle. I hook a climbing carabiner through the D Rings and attach the leash to the carabiner. If the bucket were to not be secure, the D Ring/carabiner serves as a back-up. (They aren’t on her website but she has made them upon request.)

9) Have fun with it. I’ve raced as a runner, cyclist, and triathlete for over 40 years. Running with a pup has reminded me that running is supposed to be fun. Stop… smell the flowers. Zigzag across a park to create a crazy Strava map. Chase rabbit with your pup for a fartlek. Whatever you do… remember that it is fun!