In It for the Long Run

By Michael Penn

You won't find many students labeling Ron Carda's class as "no sweat." In fact, it's very much "sweat." The lectures are sweat, the homework is sweat, and the final? Well, that's a real marathon.

Really, it is.

Each spring, Carda (pronounced with a soft c) leads a few dozen students in Marathon and Distance Training, a two-credit physical education elective that engages both the body and the mind. Part of the class is your traditional lecture-and-take-notes routine, covering aspects of physiology and biomechanics. But the rest of the class is devoted to putting those principles into motion during intense running workouts, which build up to a final goal of completing a marathon race.

"I tell students that if they consider running homework," says Carda, "this will be the most demanding class they're taking."

Students are expected to show mastery of the material through written exams, which count for 35 percent of their final grade. But their improvement as runners counts more, making up most of the remaining 65 percent. Finishing a long-distance road race is not a goal of the class: it's a requirement. By the end of the semester or shortly thereafter, students must select and enter a distance competition, and they don't receive a grade or credit for the course until they turn in documentation proving that they finished.

Carda, a member of the kinesiology faculty who has run in twenty-six marathons, prepares students for that ultimate test by helping them design and evaluate individualized workout programs. About half of the class time is spent on the track, reviewing running form and training techniques. Students chart their distance running (their homework) on graphs, which they turn in every other week for Carda's inspection.

Back in the classroom, Carda lectures on topics such as the mechanics of running, muscle development, cardiovascular function, and the benefits of nutrition - subjects to which the students are keenly attuned, since they're interacting with them firsthand.

Carda says the lectures are designed to help students "get a sense of why their bodies are doing what they're doing" when they run. There's a heavy emphasis on how exercise prepares the body for endurance tests. The students learn early on, for example, that the road training they do helps discipline the body to burn fat for fuel, rather than the comparatively limited supplies of carbohydrates stored in the body. Many of the students, as runners, may instinctively know this coming into the class, but Carda shows them how to use that knowledge to their advantage.

Running twenty-six miles pushes a body up against some of its fundamental limitations. If they didn't know how to recognize those limitations and work around them, students would inevitably become exhausted and quit before they reached the finish line. What Carda gives them is the advantage of being a smart runner.

On one morning, for example, Carda prompts students to consider their heart rates. "I think everybody understands that when we exercise, our heart rates go up," he tells a room full of thin, athletic bodies assembled before him in a lecture hall at the McClain center. The reason is fairly simple, he notes: muscles work by burning oxygen, and when we exercise, we increase the demand for fuel. Automatically, the heart responds by beating more frequently to increase the supply of oxygenated blood to the muscles. "It's a pretty remarkable system," Carda explains.

But not a perfect one. Carda illustrates that the total amount of blood the heart can pump out is limited by the fact that at some point a heart can't beat any faster - a factor controlled by a person's age and health. To some extent, the heart can make up for that ceiling by beating harder, thus pumping a greater volume of blood out with each beat. But that quantity, known as stroke volume, is also limited, he says.

Carda asks the students to consider why this is the case - why doesn't stroke volume just continue to rise as the muscles require more blood flow? "It would be great if it did . . ." he offers, while scanning the room for a volunteer.

When none responds (which may have something to do with the fact that lectures begin at 7:20 a.m.), he begins beating an eraser against the marker board at the front of the classroom in a slow, steady rhythm. As the students recognize this as an imitated heartbeat, he quickens the rhythm, beating faster until he reaches a rapid-fire pounding. "How much time between beats is there [for the heart] to get blood into the chamber?" he asks. "Not very much, right?"

The bottom line, Carda explains, is that no matter how conditioned a runner is, everyone is limited by certain factors, the heart's capacity being one. At some level of exertion, our bodies are no longer capable of aerobic metabolism; the oxygen we breathe and that the heart carries from the lungs still isn't enough to meet the energy needs of our muscles. As a runner approaches this point, the body relies more on glucose and less on fat for fuel.

"The very thing that we're trying to spare during a marathon is glucose," he says. "As we're exercising at a faster work rate, we're burning more carbohydrates, and we're effectively burning the candle down faster. And when the candle gets burned down to a nub, that's when you hit the wall."

These lessons underscore a main theme of the course, that the successful marathoner isn't necessarily the fastest runner, but often the smartest one. A race of that distance challenges runners to maximize their bodies' capacity to breathe efficiently and conserve fuel. The runners who know how to do that are the ones who make it to the finish line.

To that end, Carda encourages students to constantly monitor their heart rates and breathing rates to ensure that they don't push their bodies beyond the aerobic threshold. (Some of the students accomplish this by wearing armband heart monitors when they run.) Although it may seem counterintuitive, he tells them that they really shouldn't breathe hard during a long race. The lungs, he explains, are "super-organs," with more than enough capacity to fill any marathoner's blood with oxygen. Breathing hard is a bad sign, he says, and it "usually means you're running too hard."

Later, talking about fluid replacement, he cautions students against drinking too little during a race. Runners can lose one to three liters of fluid in an hour of racing, but they usually won't feel thirsty until their bodies are already low on fluids. By that time, it can be hard to replace the fluids, no matter how much water a runner drinks. "You really need to force yourself to drink water," Carda advises. "Don't wait until you're thirsty."

Many of those insights are gleaned from Carda's own experiences. A lifelong runner who hopes someday to compete in a marathon in every state, he says that he tries to share what he's done right over the years, as well as what he's done wrong.

Jenna Garrow x'03, an education major who took the course during the spring semester, says Carda's experience radiated throughout the class. "The way he ran the class was amazing," she says.

A former cross-country runner, Garrow has wanted for several years to complete a marathon. In May, she raced in the Madison Marathon, finishing in just under four hours. The class contributed significantly to reaching her goal, she says, noting that she "probably wouldn't have been half as ready without it.

"I know that running isn't necessarily the most enjoyable topic, and it was tough to get up so early," Garrow says. "But it really was the best experience I've had in class since being here."

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