Top marathoners buy speed. They hire coaches and fly to altitude camps. Vinny Mauri's main expense is a gym membership. He's 25, lives outside Youngstown, Ohio, and coaches himself. He does most of his running on ordinary treadmills at his local Planet Fitness, $24.99 a month. In April he won Toledo's Glass City Marathon in 2:05:54. That's 4:48 a mile, and no American had ever run a faster first marathon.
Rachel Bachman tells his story in Monday's Journal. Chicago, on Sunday, Oct. 11, was a different test, with a deeper and faster field. Mauri came 10th in 2:06:45. More than 55,000 runners were registered. Amos Kipruto of Kenya won in 2:01:09. Mauri didn't have to move anywhere to get there. "People love that I'm just doing it from here, doing it from home," he said. He still runs into old high-school classmates at the gym.
The treadmill wasn't a last resort. It fixed him. Mauri won the 3,200-meter state title in high school, then underachieved at Arizona State and Notre Dame. He got hurt and he overtrained. His problem, he says, was loving running too much. Every workout got too fast. The machine solved that three ways. The belt is bouncier than pavement. There are no turns, which spares a hip he hurt in college. And it works like a metronome. It holds the pace he picked and won't let him get excited. "He knows that he kind of needs that speed governor on his running," says Chris Neal, his coach at Notre Dame.
The weather's always good inside
This isn't easy running. In June he ran a full marathon on a treadmill in about 2:20. He once ran 45 miles across two sessions in one day. About 70% of his Chicago training was on the belt. He throws a T-shirt over the display so he can't fiddle with the numbers. Then he watches YouTube, golf or stand-up, and calls friends mid-run. He recently turned pro with a shoe deal from Asics. He also got a free one-year Planet Fitness membership, which may be the more useful perk.
Our read
This is Behavioral, with a little Cash Flow (M5). Mauri's edge isn't the cheap gym. It's that the cheap gym came with a governor. Left alone, he goes too fast and gets hurt. The belt takes that choice away. Investors have the same problem in reverse and forward. When markets are exciting we buy too much of the hot thing. When they're scary we stop. The fix is the same as his. A plain machine, set once, that holds the pace and doesn't show you the numbers every minute. Expensive inputs don't make it better. Steady does.
Here's the part of your own plan this touches. Your treadmill is the automatic contribution to the 401(k) or IRA, and your T-shirt over the screen is how often you check it. This week, open the 401(k) app and confirm two things. The contribution is set to automatic, and the fund you're in charges a fee you can name. Then look at how many times you opened the app last month. If the answer is daily, cover the display. A governor beats a burst of effort every time. You hang the umbrella by the door before the rain, and you set the contribution before the next exciting week.