Race to the Swift? Not Necessarily

The city was hot and humid and the air so polluted, Mr. Spence said, that he felt as though he could not take a full breath. His adviser, David Martin, an exercise physiologist, agreed. They were, Dr. Martin said, “the most challenging conditions that have ever been reported for world championships.”

But Mr. Spence, who is now the head cross-country coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, had trained long and hard for the race, the International Association of Athletics Federations’ World Championships. He had run so much that a five-minute-per-mile pace “felt like a jog,” he said. But his training had been so exhausting that he had to sleep 10 hours a night and nap 2 hours every afternoon. And his schedule, running 140 miles a week, was so onerous that he needed 5,000 calories a day to sustain himself.

“I got sick of eating,” he said.

Even so, he and Dr. Martin, who is a professor at Georgia State University, planned his training by trial and error, Mr. Spence recalled. “We just kind of muddled our way through,” he said.

Times have changed. Armed with new knowledge of how to survive a grueling race in heat, humidity and pollution, trainers and coaches say they are already starting to plan for two races that may be as bad as Mr. Spence’s — the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, in 2007, and the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

It is so early that the athletes for the races have not even been selected. But exercise physiologists and trainers are planning every detail, from a mile-by-mile examination of the routes to the use of a chemical that can prevent dehydration to methods for coping with the extreme air pollution in China.

Each tip, each special preparation, might take only 1 percent or so off a runner’s time, but that can mean the difference between fame and defeat.

And that includes psychological preparation, says Gloria Balague, who directs sports psychology services at the Sports Medicine Center and Human Performance Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“You can’t just hope to have a good day,” Dr. Balague said.

Mr. Spence’s experience shows how preparation and planning — even without the advances of the last decade — can determine who wins a race. At 6 a.m. on race day in Tokyo, the temperature was already in the 70’s and humidity was high. Mr. Spence knew he could not keep up his usual pace in those conditions, so his strategy was to run slower than usual and hope his training would pull him through, allowing him to speed up at the end while the faster runners faded.

The gun went off, and the other runners quickly pulled ahead.

“You begin to wonder, ‘Where am I?’ ” Mr. Spence recalled. “The leaders are so far ahead of me that I’ll never catch up.” Would they really wilt and fall behind on the 26-mile course?

They did, and so did many others: 40 percent of the runners never finished. Mr. Spence came in third, 40 seconds behind the winner, with an average pace of 5 minutes 11 seconds per mile. He went down in sports history as one of the few American marathoners to win a medal in a world championship.

“Was I the third most fit person in that race? Absolutely not,” Mr. Spence said. “Was I the third most talented? Absolutely not.” What made the difference, he said, was his training and strategy.

Now, with plenty of time to prepare for the races in Osaka and Beijing, USA Track & Field sponsored a small meeting for coaches, distance runners and trainers on getting to the medals podium. Mr. Spence told how he prevailed in Tokyo; exercise physiologists shared research results; and coaches of the champion American Olympic marathoners Meb Keflezighi and Deena Kastor revealed their athletes’ preparations.

It was not the typical scientific meeting. At least half the people in the room wore runners’ watches on their wrists and running shoes on their feet. The meeting adjourned for 2½ hours in the late afternoon so the participants could go for a run and eat dinner. And it seemed that no training tip was too minor to be of interest.