October: Voodoo

   It's okay to throw up before a race. Wear your lucky socks; chant your secret incantation. Indulge every neurosis, all your loopy rituals - not only before competition but with every workout. Running is the perfect private domain. Make it yours entirely, however you see fit.

   Just be sure your various voodoos aren't buying you a weekend at the nut hut. We consider it easy, even necessary, to laugh at the superstitions of other runners while nervously whistling at our own, often unaware of how much nonsense seeps into our workouts. If you feel that only an oat-bran-whey-beet-juice smoothie can fuel a 10-mile run, bottoms up. Who’s to call you crazy? With enough research, you'll find scientific proof to justify the unique benefits of this breakfast, even though the same science would as likely recommend wallpaper paste and sparrow dung.

   A quirky diet makes an easy target for ridicule. Despite prodigious advances in nutrition, a world of mystery still lies between your gaping maw and a speedy 6-mile workout. There's probably no harm in taking protein powders, sports bars, vitamin-spiked water, and other elixirs and magic foods. But just remember that the multibillion-dollar sports food industry sells hope, not nutrition. Companies peddle these wares using scientific language because it sounds impressive. Unfortunately, the actual science behind most sports foods is, at best, medieval conjecture.

   Stretching is likewise speculative hoodoo, bouncing from one side of running orthodoxy to the other. There are Olympic marathoners who can't touch their toes. A raft of recent studies asserts that stretching is more likely to cause, rather than prevent, injury. Other studies show that stretching is crucial for runners who want to keep their mileage up deep into their later years. Yoga, anyone?

   Even running itself leads to nutty obsessions. Hill charges, running in sand dunes, the "pose" method, water workouts, and jogging backward all deliver demonstrable benefits - to some runners, some of the time, depending on their goals. Running books and web sites dole out workout programs with breezy authority, rarely taking into account that a high-school track star and an overweight insurance salesman shouldn't seek the same rate of progress, even if their goals are identical.

   Most of us recognize a fad when we see one. Common sense wards off the worst of running's obsessions and quackery. Still, look how our attention fixes on a new shoe technology, a new sports gel, or a new training technique. Witness how quickly we dispense advice to a fellow runner, even when there isn't a jot of supporting evidence to back what we say. We share our voodoo with fellow initiates; we seek it wherever we can. And we should periodically reexamine every aspect of our workouts to see where the security and hope they promise cheat us out of speed and endurance. In most cases, there's no harm done. In the meantime, go ahead and wear your lucky bracelet. You owe no one an explanation.