By Don McLean

Jeff Sather is the coach of the Oregon Track Club Masters. Usually, our workouts are at 5:30 PM, Tuesday, on the track at South Eugene High School, but sometimes on the Amazon trail nearby, or at Hendricks Park. Free to OTCM members. No qualifying times or trials. Join us!

1. OK, Chapter 1, The Early Years. Life-long Oregonian? Sports played? Have you always preferred running, or not until you ran some awesome time in a P.E. mile? 

I was born in Eugene, Oregon and have been pretty active all my life. When I was a little kid, I was playing basketball, baseball, soccer, and always getting together with neighborhood kids to do some kind of crazy game outside. I consider myself lucky, in that I also had a dad that took us outdoors a lot. During the summers, we were backpacking into lakes, camping, and fishing the majority of the weekends. I grew to really have a love for the outdoors. Anyway, it wasn't until my junior year of high school when I started running. I was playing basketball after school a lot. One day before playing, I ran into this guy and asked him to join our game. He told me that he couldn't because he had Cross Country practice and then he suggested that I come out and run with them. I turned him down, but he ended up asking me 3 days in a row. On the third day, I wasn't playing basketball so I finally said, "okay." It was on that day that I found out that running was really difficult. I wasn't good at it at all! I only continued because I was stubborn and liked the challenge. I think the first 5k I ever ran was 19:10 on a cross country course. 

2. Where did you run and race past high school? Best event and PRs?

I had no intention of continuing running at all past high school, but a former teammate, Brian Keady, was running for Lane and suggested I go out for the team too. It was mid-summer 1997 and I hadn't been running at all, just working a lot of hours as a Land Surveyor to save money for school. With Brian urging me to come out, I started running a few weeks before we had practice. At the first practice, I remember running out to Mt Pisgah and back on a blistering hot August day for an "easy run." Everyone basically raced it (or at least it felt like that to me) with Billy Harper easily bounding away at 5:20 pace or so and a number of other guys with some solid high school accolades, promptly testing each other. 

It was a physically painful time, but I improved a lot at Lane, running 15:40 for 5k and 32:52 for 10k. After Lane, I went to U of O, but I definitely wasn't good enough to get on the team. Lucky for me, I was able to join Team Eugene and get coaching from Matt Lonergan. Later, on I joined up with Ross Krempley's Team XO. I improved my times, running 15:09 and 31:41 but also had the misfortune of tearing my left hammy, which led to a string of injuries in my mid-twenties instead of further progressing. 

Although I had a number of down years from that injury, I love the sport, so I've always stuck with it. After 20 years running I'm still trying to figure out my best event. Longer events with hilly terrain play more to my strengths. For example, I really like the Dirty Half in Bend, Oregon. Overall, I love the 1/2 marathon distance in general, though I've only ran a few of them (1:12:12 personal best). However, the Dirty Half race is particularly great because of the moderate elevation, hills, and the fact that it's almost all run on trails. I'll definitely be getting into a lot more trail runs in the near future. 

3. Our workouts always start with drills. Describe. And reasons why. 

The reason is really just injury prevention. Honestly, a lot of people will show up to run a workout right out of their car without even doing a warmup. This is crazy to me! I'm used to always doing a 20 minute warmup, drills, and strides prior to working out. If you don't properly warm up, your risk of injury increases dramatically. I also have people do drills on their easy days. Doing them regularly helps build the mechanics to be a stronger runner and creates the neuromuscular connections necessary to be a faster runner.

4. Briefly describe/explain a typical cut-down workout, and why the effort and rest recovery is so carefully prescribed.

It's all about what you're trying to accomplish on a given day. To look at it simply, if you're trying to improve lactate threshold, your rests will be short ones but your intervals will be more controlled. If you're doing VO2 Max work, you'll be getting longer rest periods, but your intervals will be comparatively fast, depending on the distance you're training for. For the most part, since I only see people in the Tuesday group once a week, I try to focus primarily on improving lactate threshold, and maintaining leg speed. If we did VO2 Max work every week, I guarantee most people would be injured or would just stop showing up because of burnout. Sure, we'll throw in a hard interval here and there, but I generally don't have entire workouts focused on VO2 Max. I focus on the things that you can do week after week that will make a long term impact on your training without leading to injury or burnout. 

5. Usually in the summer, we do a 300 meter hill interval workout at Hendricks Park. You said it's one of the best speed workouts you can do. Why? And with details on form and effort and recovery period.

Funny, I actually wrote a blog about this at one point. That workout is described in detail here. Additionally, we utilize Hendricks Park and the northeast half of Amazon trail 1k loop in the summer because of the shade. 

6. What are your views on core work, cross training, other non-running activities to minimize injuries and maximize strength and endurance? 

I think we all need to have more activity in our lives. If you're only workout is running and you do nothing else, in the long-term you're going to end up injured and have some significant weaknesses to correct. 

7. What coaches have influenced you, and how?

That's a tough question. I've studied a lot of training philosophies and they all influence me. I always look for the reasons why coaches run the workouts they run at the times they run them. It's also interesting to see different ways of accomplishing the same type of training stimuli. However, for all that I've read, I would still have to say that my friend Rick Fuller influenced me the most with the training knowledge he imparted on me. I learned from him that you can't force things. You really have to take your time getting in shape. That means doing workouts where you walk away before you're spent. It also means giving attention to recovery windows between like sessions and recognizing that training is dynamic, not static. Sometimes you need to run fast, sometimes you need to run slow. There's a different purpose to every workout and every run. Thus, running faster does not necessarily make for better training. 

8. Favorite running books?

My girlfriend Monica had a copy of Born to Run. That was pretty fun to read. 

9. Track or cross country? 

I'm in love with them both, it just depends on the season. Right now I'm in love with track but in the Fall, I'm sure that will change. 

10. Finally, probably most importantly, where are the women? There used to be women in our usual group, but none in recent times. What's your action plan? Or is it us?

Ha, it definitely must be that all you old guys are scaring them off. ;) I know Monica would love to start coming to Tuesday nights, but the time conflicts with her work. Just talking out loud here, but maybe during the summer more people could show up if we started at 6 pm instead of 5:30. Food for thought