Irish Style, Explained

Back when I was in college (such a very long time ago), my roommate Ben and I developed a fascination with Ireland - its history, its people, its dangerous-sounding but ultimately delicious mixed drinks. But more than anything else, we were infatuated with the long and illustrious lineage of Irish distance runners - Ron Delany, Eamonn Coghlan, John Treacy, Marcus O'Sullivan, Mark Carroll, Alistair Cragg (to name just a few). Ben always envied my connections with the Irish running community through my friend Kieran Stack, and would often grill me about "what it was like running with those guys." Each time I would recollect one of my more memorable "Irish" runs, always embellishing, of course. Pretty soon, both of us wanted to train just like the Irish guys, embrace their attitude toward running, and mold ourselves into surrogate children of Auld Eire.

And so the notion of "Irish style" running was born. Perhaps not surprisingly, our vision of what constituted "Irish" was borne more out of hearsay and fanciful conjecture than any sort of real empirical observation. Basically, I remembered that all of my best runs with Stack began at an easy pace and ended up much faster - and thus we associated Irish style running with progressively increasing our pace over the course of the run. Really, there was nothing Irish about this - it was just smart training, introduced to me by experienced runners who happened to be Irish. For Ben and I, though, this was our spiritual and physiological connection to the Emerald Isle, and so we embraced it passionately.

Irish style became an entire framework for thinking about running; we even went so far as to classify different subclasses of Irish running. There was "lazy Irish," which involved starting out easy - as with ordinary Irish - but never really picking up the pace. Then there was "psychotic Irish," usually done on a closed-circuit course of several loops, in which each loop had to be run faster than the one before. It was systematized Irish, an unholy bastardization that captured the letter of the law but not its spirit, and was usually reserved for times when one sought to get oneself injured, or perhaps punish oneself for having too many pints the night before.

None of these variations could take the place of the one, true Irish. John Kellogg might have (unwittingly) described this original Irish style best in his "JK Speaks: Progressing To Peak Fitness." Some of the key phrases would have to be "internal sense," "just enough and not too much," "zen-like rhythm," "under control," "energized, free-spirited, weightless sensation," and, of course, "practice, practice and more practice." Irish style is the quintessentially artistic approach to training. It can't be described formulaically on paper, but through practice, it can be perfected, like any other artistic endeavor.