“They are crazy people,” a traveler grumbled to an airport food stand employee a short way from my departure gate.
I can’t tell you why this person said that or what preceded their moment of displeasure. What I do know, or at least think, is this: The world is far from black and white. It is a tumultuous, undulating, ever-changing sea of gray.
Yet, time and again, we try to navigate it via a set of black-and-white rules, opinions, and judgments. Often, it doesn’t work, and still we keep at it. It bothers me that we do this.
I, too, am an offender. Shortly before hearing this random traveler’s grumbles, I committed a similar offense. A frustrating check-in experience with the airport staff had my brain making broad, sweeping judgments about an entire nation of people.
Then something surprising happened. After picking out some food for the plane ride, I walked to the checkout counter to pay. At the counter, the same employee who bore the brunt of the comments I had overheard moments ago served me in the friendliest way. They stood in stark contrast to my check-in experience and reminded me that we mustn’t be too quick to judge and that my first encounters were not indicative of everything this place and its people had to offer.
Zach Miller racing the 2025 Transgrancanaria Vertical Kilometer. Photo: Mountains Legacy Films
But what about in running? Do we see it in the same light? Do we judge one another and even ourselves in a black-and-white fashion, as if there is a right and wrong way to do things?
I think sometimes we do. For years I have felt like people are often on the hunt for the secrets of training. They long to know which methods work best and which magical workouts will make the difference in their racing. The ambition in this is good, but training, like life, is nuanced. In other words, it is a bit like my experience at the airport in that it isn’t black and white. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another.
This is important to realize because there is so much information out there these days. From Strava to Instagram, from magazines to books, and even just word of mouth, there is a ton to sort through. Look one way, and you might see double-threshold workouts and fancy lactate meters. Look another, and you’ll find people counting carbohydrates, sodium, and ounces of water. At times, it’s overwhelming.
With so many people sharing such details, it’s easy to want to play copycat, but doing things just because other people are can be dangerous. We can definitely toy around with ideas, but we should use caution with a cut-and-paste mentality. Grabbing exact workouts or fueling strategies from someone else’s training and inserting them into our own is like making broad generalizations about society: Sometimes they check out, other times they are light years from the truth.
Views from Smith Rock State Park, Oregon, on one of the author’s recent runs. Photo: Zach Miller
What can we do instead? We look for the concepts and figure out how to apply them in a way that is most effective for us. Take nutrition, for example. Right now, people are hyped up about consuming high amounts of carbohydrates while training and racing. But let’s not forget what our actual goal is, which is to get to the finish line as fast as possible. If it takes more carbs for you to do that, then go for it, but remember, at the end of the day, it’s still a running competition. The goal is to find your own fueling ideal, not consume as much as possible. That competition happens on the U.S.’s Fourth of July with a lot of hot dogs and some guy named Joey Chestnut.
The same goes for training. If your primary goal with training is to enjoy it, do whatever pleases you. But if your goal is to perform as best you can, it’s about finding that sweet spot. Performing well at races doesn’t make training a competition to see who can do the most volume or the gnarliest workouts. It’s about doing whatever is needed to run as fast as possible on race day. What this looks like will likely be different for everyone, so again, apply the concepts, don’t copy and paste the workouts.
After all, it’s about the gray, not the black and white.
Call for Comments
Have you ever made generalizations or seen the world, or training, as black and white?
