Wednesday, July 05, 2006

LANDIS INTERVIEW

First off, being an official member of Elizabeth Yetzer’s unofficial fan club I need to post this article (thanks to Eric for the heads up). It’s about Yetzer running 10:12 in the Nike Outdoor Nationals 2-mile and placing second to fellow Minnesotan, Bria Wetsch who ran 10:10. Mike Torchia who’s also been mentioned here before came in 4th in the boys’ race with a time of 8:50.

Since what follows is rather long, I just give the quick update on my training. I managed 8 miles yesterday – pushing Katie for 22 minutes and Kinsey for 44 minutes. When I push the girls my mileage is based on effort. It’s not like I was running 8:15 pace, but it felt like it.

This morning I ran a very easy 5 miles. I was planning on 7-8 but the bathroom was calling. I decided that’d I just call it an easy morning run and then (hopefully) double-up tonight. I wasn't planning on adding doubles for awhile, but the article below fired me up.

Yesterday I was reading an article in Outside on Floyd Landis and he had some really interesting things to say. The first is one of my pet peeves.

On giving more than 100%...
“Why not 112%? Why not 500% or 1300% or 38 billion percent? I mean, if he can crank it up beyond 100%, why not? What’s stopping him, exactly?”

On excuses…
“Everybody wants to say, ‘I couldn’t win because of this or that.’ To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. One excuse is as good as another.”

On training…
“There’s only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won’t die. Even though you feel like you’ll die, you don’t actually die. Like when you’re training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always do one more.”

Then his roommate says, “I hope some 16-year-old doesn’t read this and then go kill himself on the bike.”

To which Landis says, “That was what I did. I read something like that, and I trained like that, and, yeah, I was pretty damn depressed for a while. Then it got better.”

On overtraining…
Interviewer: “So there’s no such thing as overtraining?”
Landis: “If you overtrained, it means you didn’t train hard enough to handle that level of training. So you weren’t overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there’s the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins.”

On sharing his training log…
“I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just a number I produced on a certain day. What matters is what happens on the road.”

On Lance…
“I saw firsthand what Lance did, and it was superhuman. I saw how his system worked. It’s not necessary for me to be like Lance in every way. But there are some things that I want to take from that and use. Like his boldness at taking charge of things. His willingness to say, ‘This is what I want, and I’m going to take it.’ It’s very hard to compete against that.”

“Everything with Lance was so big. He was able to mange it all somehow. For me, that would be stupid. I train hard, I race my bike – that’s it. All the rest, that’s not me. I would be an idiot to try.”

Today’s quote of the day also comes from the Landis article regarding thoughts that he might be peaking too early for the Tour de France;

“Peaking too early? What is that, Chinese? Let me translate: Blah-blah-fucking-blah.” – Floyd Landis

5 comments:

D said...

Very interesting interview. I like his attitude.

Triseverance said...

“Peaking too early? What is that, Chinese? Let me translate: Blah-blah-fucking-blah.” – Floyd Landis


hahahaha I love that especially since a friend of mine said he thought I was running to much early in my training and that I as peaking to early. I had no response other then "I'll be fine" now I can say, naaaa I perfer the Moo Shoo Pork.

Anonymous said...

Love the quote!

Mike said...

yeah..great interview...I hope Floyd does well at the tour this year once it starts heading into the hills.

Also- your comment re: Multnomah Falls, I'll definitely make the stop the next time I'm in the Gorge

SRR said...

God I do love a good quote like that. Where do you find these?