Denny Krahe: Diz Runs podcaster on cheating, pushing limits and why people should run
Our Q&A with ultra runner Denny discusses some of the big issues in the running world
A qualified coach, a running podcaster with more than 1,000 episodes behind him and an ultra runner, when it comes to talking about this sport we love who better to chat to than Denny Krahe.
His podcast, Diz Runs, revolves around the idea that every runner has a story and it's great to talk about them. It also includes hints and tips on how to improve your running, as well as advice on injury prevention - a field Denny is also a specialist in.
Running Tales caught up with Denny to talk about some of the big issues in the world of running, including asking why people feel the need to cheat and how far runners can - and should - push themselves.
We started out conversation by asking him a question very familiar to him - the one he starts all his podcasts with.
What is your favourite distance to run over and why?
Yeah, that is the question I always start my podcasts off with. It's a tricky one for me to answer because it can go two different directions.
I think my favourite distance to race is still the marathon. It's a challenging distance. Obviously, anybody who's ever tried to race a marathon knows that it's tricky and it's a lot of mental battle.
There's a lot of physical battle that goes along with it as well, but I think I enjoy the marathon because I'm still, quite frankly, trying to get it right. And I don't know that I'll ever get it right, but I feel like with experience and with having done it a few times and continuing to train and continuing to build my fitness, I think I'm getting better at it.
But I hope I still haven't reached my potential. I hope that there's room for continued growth and improvement. For me, my goals are about getting faster. I eventually want to qualify for the Boston Marathon, and I’ve still got a pretty decent amount of time I need to shave off to get that BQ.
So, hopefully I can still do that over the next handful of years and get older, because that always helps with Boston too. The older you get, the more realistic the qualifying times come. Although maybe I won't say that five or 10 years from now. Maybe I'll still think they're a bit unrealistic, but, ultimately, that's the nut I'm still trying to crack.
So, the marathon is my favourite. But I do think that I'm better at racing the half-marathon. I’m a guy who can be a little bit competitive with myself once in a while, and try to push and I feel like I haven't reached my peak at the half marathon yet. But, knock on wood, just about every time I've raced the half in the last five or six years, I feel like I've really got it right.
It's kind of a split answer - the marathon because I'm still trying to figure it out, and the half-marathon because I think I have figured it out. But I'm a sucker for just about any race longer than 5k. I don't like a 5k. It’s too short and fast and hard, but anything longer than that, I'll take it.
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How is the attempt to BQ going at the moment? You say you're a little while off still, but how far is a ‘little while’?
It's a lot of a while. I haven't really raced a marathon for five years, which tells you how close I am to qualifying. My last marathon that I raced hard, I did a tick under the four hour mark. So, I'm under four hours, but they keep changing the qualifying times.
But I think I'm now at the point where I need a 3.10 or a sub 3.10 to qualify for Boston. So around 45 minutes is what I need to just get under the mark. and then if you know enough about the Boston Marathon, nine times out of ten, just getting under the qualifying time isn't enough. Then you still need to shave another three or four minutes under that time.
I've got a long way to go and kind of joking, but kind of realistically, if I eyeball by the time I’m about 50, 55 - which is another 10 to 15 years down the road - that I can get 20 minutes faster, that's where the lines start to cross.
But I don't want to sell myself short and say I couldn't run a 3.15 or a 3.20 in the next five years. I do think I could run significantly faster than that 3.58, but part of me thinks what's the point of hammering it when I'm still going to be 25, 35 minutes away?
Maybe, instead, just run it a little bit more conservatively and not feel as miserable afterwards because I'm not going to qualify, probably, either way. Then there's people that go, well, if you tell yourself you're not going to qualify, of course you're not going to qualify. Maybe you could. And it's like, yeah, but a 45-minute PB in a marathon right now, that's a big swing. Never say never. But realistically, I don't know that that's on the cards right now.
There's always this counterbalance between enjoying running and really hitting targets. Some people are happy running a marathon in eight hours, or for whom that’s their big goal. Others want to do 140-milers or sub-three marathons. All these people can co-exist, but deciding what type of runner you want to be is always an interesting one.
For sure. For me, the ultimate guiding principle is, and forgive me if this sounds slightly morbid, but I want to keep running until they put me in the ground. As long as I'm still on the Earth and upright and breathing, I want to be able to go out and run.
And maybe, God willing, 40 or 50 years from now, a 16-minute mile might be my running base. But that's okay. I'm up and I'm moving and I'm still getting after it.
So, I try to also weigh some of those decisions while really trying to maximise every ounce of fitness and potential that I have right now. And maybe it could even be something close to Boston qualifying. But what does that do on the back end? Do I start playing with injury, really ramping up my injury risk, which is something that I don't really want to do - even if it's a quote, unquote short-term injury.
I like running enough that I don't want to be on the shelf for six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks with some type of strain or sprain or whatever, just in the name of a PR for a race.
There's a lot of conflicting emotions when it comes to really racing hard, especially for those longer distances. The longer you're at that red line, the more stress goes onto the system. And if there's any weak links or any areas where there's that concern, the longer you’re all in, the more likely something's going to go sideways.
I guess I'd rather be slightly slower than I could be on race day, but finish healthy, than really take that risk and go all out and potentially hit the home run, but also potentially be on the injured list for a while.
When it comes to pushing the body, we are seeing some incredible feats in the running world. Recently Harvey Lewis ran 450 miles at Big’s Backyard, which is clearly phenomenal. But I’ve heard some people suggesting this kind of running is potentially quite dangerous. How far do you think people should go in terms of pushing their limits?
It's one of those things where I do see both sides of the coin. It's incredible what some people can do. If I'm honest, for me, that’s probably not 400-and-some odd miles over the course of four-and-a-half days, with basically hardly any sleep.
But I think a lot of us, and I'll certainly raise my hand as being one, could do more. If I had the willingness to push myself to that level of extreme, and that level of just keep going, and have the mental toughness and the mental fortitude to not stop.
I haven't talked to Harvey. I don't know him, other than from social media and seeing some of the stuff that he's done before that race, but he's clearly just a really strong, dedicated runner with all kinds of mental toughness and fortitude.
But I'm sure it wasn't easy. I'm sure it was hard. I'm sure there were times that he thought, at some three-and-a-half days in, ‘you know what, maybe forget this, maybe it's time to just shut it down’. But then still having that toughness, the mental toughness, to say, no, we're just going to start again, and we're going to keep going, going, to keep answering the bell.
Again, I think that myself and maybe some others listening, or maybe most others, couldn't get to that extreme, but could go a lot farther than we think we could or have ever gone before. On the flip side, almost like with the marathon, you are led into the question of what's the trade off? What's the payoff?
Maybe not long-term health wise, but what does that mean in terms of what your life looks like for the next week-and-a-half while you're recovering? Are you in a position with your profession where you can take two weeks off for a four day race because you're going to need six days to sleep, to recover and be able to move and whatnot?
And what's your family situation? Are you willing to sacrifice missing things with kids or missing things with your spouse or whatever? And again, maybe it's short enough term for four days and it falls at the right time, when it's nobody's birthday and those types of things, but it's just the trade offs. Are you willing to go to that extreme and have the potential of some type of injury or some type of situation that bubbles up because you keep pushing yourself?
I'm in awe. It's amazing what some of these folks can do. but I'm perfectly content to not be one of those folks, even if potentially I could. I'm okay being the guy that runs 40-odd miles a week, and keeps it nice and slow and touch wood, stays healthy most of the time, and has these long-term goals.
And if I'm not making much progress over a two-year window, that's okay. We'll get there, hopefully stay healthy and stay in the game long enough that we can get there, even if it's not as quickly as some other folks might.
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One potential downside of runners wanting to be seen as the best and doing spectacular things is the temptation to cut corners. In the UK, we’ve seen stories about bib-swapping and cutting the course, while at the marathon in Mexico City, it was reported that as many as 11,000 of the competitors cheated. Why does that happen in running?
I don't know. The Mexico City one makes me laugh, because clearly it was pretty well known that this was happening. I could almost understand somebody's logic of cutting the course if that allowed them to win and maybe get a payday, but if it's something that's so obvious and so unpoliced that 11,000 people can do well, you're not going to win, right?
Only one of those 11,000 can possibly win the race and these days, with cell phones and with how people can see that someone didn’t have their photograph taken at a certain point, there's just so many ways to get caught.
And, ultimately, I don't understand why people do it. Part of my goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon is that I would have done it. If I paid somebody to go run a qualifying race for me, well, then, yeah, okay, maybe I could go run the Boston Marathon. But the goal for me almost isn't running the Boston Marathon, it's the actual qualification. I do want to run the race itself, but I want to feel I got to a pretty high level of fitness relative to my age.
I just don't understand it. If my goal is to do X, why pay somebody else to do X? Or why run half of the race and then transfer my bib to somebody else, or transfer the bib from them to me so I can cross the finish line, but I only ran half the race? I can't circle the square of the logic that it takes to willingly, knowingly try to cheat in some of these races. Especially, again, when you're not racing for the win, because at that point, so you finished 4,062nd in the race instead of 4,073rd, who cares? I just can't understand it.
It comes down to ego. Because you can say you ran your four hour marathon. But you didn't. There's a result that says you did, even though you know you didn't. Maybe there's a level of ethics that some have, that others don't.
If you’re engrossed in achieving fraudulent goals, you probably also miss out on the joy of just going for a chatty run, with friends and grabbing a coffee afterwards - and that can be the best part of this whole sport.
There's no doubt that running is a social connection for a lot of folks. I joke, but I'm also serious, when I say I’m a massive introvert. You might not get from the fact that I've talked to so many people on the podcast over the years and whatnot. But that's different.
I'm talking to you one-on-one. I can handle one-on-one, and we're talking about running. I can talk about that all day. And, going to a group run, even though that's mildly out of my comfort zone, it's still a bunch of runners and we're still just cruising along. There's no pressure on a group run day, especially if it's with a couple of folks that you run with fairly regularly.
You just settle in and you're talking about running stuff and races, and you're talking about kids and you're talking about work, and it's just that connection to other folks that, especially, again, for an introvert like myself, is great.
I work from home, I'm self employed. I do this for a living, but getting out and running with somebody is something I try to do once a week or so. I've got a little group running in our neighbourhood here. It gives me a chance to connect with folks, and, for me, that's enough.
For some folks, maybe it's not enough of a social connection, but once a week with a handful of folks from the neighbourhood is perfect. Our paths would never cross otherwise. But because we meet on Thursday morning and we run for 40 minutes, I've been able to meet some folks and share that time, and I really look forward to it every week.
So running is a great social connection, as well as a great competitive aspect for me as an adult. And I know I'm not the only one that is able to tick both of those boxes through running.
What would you say to anyone who is thinking of giving running a go?
The biggest thing is to not compare yourself with other folks. That even applies to those of us that have been running for a year or five years or ten years or whatever. If you're looking for somebody who's faster than you or who runs farther than you, or whatever is more compared to where you are or where your goals are, you'll find them. You'll find dozens of people. You'll find thousands of people that are somehow more.
But why let somebody else suck the joy out of it. If you're always saying, oh, well, so and so is faster than me, and so and so runs farther than me, remember you’re still doing something. Maybe you just started and you're doing some type of run/walk and you’re worrying about only running 30 seconds at a time - but that’s ok. Stick with that for two weeks or three weeks, and pretty soon you'll be running for a minute and walking for a minute. And, suddenly you're running for two minutes at a time.
You're able to see some progress. And sure, it might not measure up to Kipchoge or to any of the elites. It might not even be at the same level where I am today. But, by the way, I've been running for 12 years. When I started I was about where you are.
So try not to play that comparison game. There’s that quote - comparison is a thief of joy. If you're always comparing, it's easy to feel like you're less than or you're not enough. It's a little bit cliche in running communities, but you're faster than all the people that aren't running.
But whether you're fast or slower, you're doing something that other people aren't. There's a lot of people that wish they were healthy enough to be able to do that. So, just shine that light on yourself, and control what you can control. And then you just build on it.
It's about consistency. Keep showing up and doing what works for you, what you need to do. You might be surprised to hear that it won't take long before people are wishing that they could do what you're doing. You might not ever know that, but I guarantee there's people out there.
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