Weighing in on Weight

In recent weeks professional running has managed to make the headlines in the news, but not necessarily for good reasons. An elite runner came out with an op-ed in the New York Times about the culture in her former professional running group and since then the topic of weight has been on the forefront of my mind. Sadly, it isn’t only prevalent at the elite level. A hyper focus on weight is prevalent from pros, to collegiate athletes, to high school athletes, to amateur adult athletes, even to young kids. I work with most of those groups I just mentioned (not pros quite yet…but one day!) and just in the last week I had three different athletes express something negative about their weight to me.

Here’s the thing: as coaches we have to tread very carefully when it comes to what we say about weight because it’s such a pervasive issue. Frankly, it’s one of those subjects most of us avoid due to the potential repercussions…but this does athletes a disservice because however controversial, it’s still important. It’s just not important in the way most people think about it. 

But before I get into that, a little back story. Most readers of this newsletter know that I ran cross country and track in college for Auburn University and then a 5th year while getting a master’s degree at Drake University. You might also know that I track a LOT of metrics when it comes to sport performance - pace, power, heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep being the main ones. So, you might be surprised to know that I don’t track calories and I rarely weigh myself. Here’s why: correlation is not causation. Being thin may be correlated to being fit or fast, but it isn’t the cause and it’s not always the case. Being fit and fast might be correlated with being healthy, but it definitely isn’t the cause and is not always the case. For example, at one point during my collegiate distance running career I was certainly very skinny, but I was neither healthy or fit. I weighed roughly 135 pounds (now I’m nearly 160), but I was nearly 12% body fat (6-8% ideal range for elite distance runners) and I had almost no energy to train. The problem was that I was focused on the number on the scale because it was “typically” correlated with being fast and being healthy, so I ate food to fix the number, not to fuel myself. I was concerned with how much I was eating, but not exactly what I was eating. This mindset is understandable because our brains love to simply things, and this seems like the simplest solution. Thankfully, (after a series of bad races and workouts) my perspective shifted to a focus on the composition of things…not the final result. This is true not just for what we’re eating of the physical makeup of our bodies, but also true of our workouts. Sometimes we get stuck on increasing average pace that we forget about the purpose behind the workouts, or we focus on what life looks like on social media that we forget about how it actual feels. A few life changing books and podcasts later, I ran a massive PR in the 8k during my final cross country season weighing 20lbs more than that 135 with LESS body fat due to an increase in muscle mass. My focus was always on the quality rather than quantity of things, and it made a huge difference in how I felt and how I performed. 

Fast forward to now and the various athletes that are concerned with their weight. I certainly don’t know everything about nutrition and I’m constantly trying to learn more, but what I do know is that the number on the scale is only a small piece of the puzzle. What matters to me is how an athlete feels in their day to day workouts. When you’re fueling yourself properly, your daily workouts consistently go well, and when your daily workouts consistently go well your body slowly transforms over time. It’s not just that the pounds that gets added or subtracted, but rather your muscle size and density shift and your metabolism speeds up and your hormones make micro adjustments over time and eventually you’re  at a completely different level of fit and healthy than you ever were before. It doesn’t happen overnight and it’s okay to be at any point in that journey. In fact, perhaps the more important lesson here is that your value doesn’t change with any increase on the scale or decrease in race times. 

I’ll conclude with two of my favorite quotes.

“If you have a body, you’re an athlete” - Bill Bowerman

“Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that so it goes on flying anyways.” - Mary Kay Ash