• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I was admiring the face piercings when a 6′2″, 193-pound punk rocker sat down in the red plush chair in front of me. He looked like a cross between Henry Rollins, Keanu Reeves, and a Navy SEAL.

Brian MacKenzie.

He shook my hand with a smile and I noticed the word “UNSCARED” tattooed across both hands, one letter on each of eight fingers. Within minutes, it became clear that we shared a similar brand of enthusiasm. The absurd kind that often overrides self-preservation.

In the early days of his endurance experiments, he had wanted to test the effects of 20-second sprints with 10-second rest intervals—the famous Tabata protocol.13

Brian somehow decided it was a good idea to start on the treadmill at an obscene 10 miles per hour at a 15-degree incline. He was forced to downshift to 9 miles per hour on a 10-degree grade after one and a half minutes. Then he flew off the back of the treadmill frozen in form, like a human gingerbread man. He landed on the floor with his legs locked, where he remained for more than five minutes at near-fibrillation. His two training partners, rather than help him up, stood over him laughing and pointing at his face, repeating over and over again:

“Dude, that was AWESOME! Buahahaha!”

My kinda guy.

I downed the last third of my Merlot and got down to business.

“So, what do you really think you could do with me in eight to twelve weeks?”

I explained my apparent handicaps, and he leaned forward on his elbows:

“None of that matters. I could get you to a half marathon in eight weeks. That’s assuming you have a baseline and can run a 5K in less than 24 minutes [3.1 miles at 8 minutes per mile or less].”

“What if I have never run 5Ks?”

“Fine. I’d have you do intervals first and build up to it. You have no shin splints or plantar fasciitis, right?”

“Right.”

“And we have 12 weeks?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then we can make miracles happen.”

He’d taken one trainee, nicknamed “Rookie,” to a mountainous 50K (31.2 mile) ultramarathon in 11 weeks. Prior to that, Rookie had never run more than four miles at a stretch.

Another trainee, a 43-year-old marathoner with an 8:30 mile pace, couldn’t even complete three 400-meter sprints at the beginning of training. She had “no gears,” as Brian put it: she couldn’t maintain a 7:30 mile pace for even three minutes.

Two months prior to the New York City marathon, Brian had her do 16 minutes of total sprint training per week, in addition to four conditioning workouts per week using weights and calisthenics. Total workout volume was less than three hours per week. She called him daily the week prior to the marathon, often crying, pointing out the obvious:

“This will never work.”

It worked.

She finished the marathon in 3 hours and 32 minutes—an 8-minute pace, 30 seconds per mile less than her previous time—and she would have finished much sooner had she not stopped to help another runner at the end.

Had she not stopped, Brian estimated her truer finish time at 3:30, a 7:28.8 per mile pace.

Brian had given her gears with 16 minutes per week.

The Journey from High Volume to Low Volume

Brian started in sports as a short-course swimmer. His coach couldn’t get him to swim more than 100 meters without blowing apart at the seams.

In late 2000, he was conned into a short-course “sprint” triathlon by a 47-year-old friend who was a 13-time Ironman finisher. It was short but sweet: a 500-meter swim, a 13-mile bike, and a 5-kilometer run.

He didn’t blow apart this time, partially because he wasn’t competing against swimming specialists. Much to his surprise, he loved it so much that he signed up for the Ironman the next day. He’d been bitten by the bug.

Brian climbed up the ranks of the triathlon world with an Olympic-distance race, a half-Ironman, and then the Canadian Ironman. He trained 24 to 30 hours per week, just as his competitors did, including roughly eight miles of swimming, 200+ miles of cycling, and 50+ miles of running. It was par for the course in the endurance world, but it wasn’t good for the body,