Interview with Pete Rea

By Shannon Martin

Pete Rea, 38, is the head coach of the ZAP Fitness professional distance running group in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The acronym ZAP stands for Zika and (the late) Andy Palmer (the founders of the facility and camp). Rea’s been with ZAP since its inception in 2002 and has helped 10 ZAP Fitness athletes to Olympic Trials qualifying times at distances from 1500 meters to the marathon. A Connecticut native and former University of Connecticut track and field and cross country standout, Rea has been coaching runners since he was an undergraduate. He’s passionate about coaching and firmly believes in creating truly individualized training plans.

The drive that I took to meet him was exquisite. It began with a 10 miles on the Blue Ridge Parkway, considered one of the country’s most scenic roads. I drove through mountain meadows of pink, purple, and white rhododendrons, past amazing views of distant mountains. I turned onto Aho Road, passing street signs with names like Hummingbird Lane and Locust Point Drive, before turning onto a dirt road. Then it was a 4-mile climb to the ZAP Fitness Elite Training Center and Mountain Retreat. I could feel the hill workout in my car!

When I arrived at ZAP, Pete Rea showed me the impressive facilities. The main building houses a strength training room with state-of-the-art equipment (and a foosball table); a kitchen and dining area; and an exercise physiology lab where Zika Rea conducts VO2-max and lactate-threshold testing. Upstairs are the corporate offices and resident athletes’ rooms. An adjoining building is used for adult running campers and groups who rent out the facility. ZAP is on 63 acres of rolling green hills.

Rea and I chatted on a wooden platform about 100 yards from the facility, where the athletes often do drills and stretching. We could hear a stream concealed by large trees.

Pete Rea [gesturing toward the stream]: The athletes love the stream--they dip in it after their long runs.

MensRacing.com: Perfect ice bath!

PR: Yep, that’s their ice bath. In the deep pools, you find trout—our athletes fish in there as well.

MR: Do they eat the fish that they catch?

PR: Occasionally, but more often than not they’ll throw them back.

MR: How did you first became involved with running?

PR: I began running because of my mother. In the mid-`70s, when I was a kid, she was running road races in Connecticut and I got tired of just watching. When I was 9, I ran with her in the Manchester Road Race, and I had a really tough time staying with her. I was determined to run better the next year. I was also a frustrated soccer player at the time. I was good enough to make the travel squad, but I never played . . . and I preferred to play. So, I started running more seriously in junior high school and high school. I then ran collegiately and post-collegiately for Nike, and got into coaching at the same time.

MR: Before you came to ZAP, you taught English and coached track and cross country at Walton High School outside of Atlanta. I understand that you started coaching runners years before you coached at Walton High School. Can you tell me more about when you first became interested in coaching runners?

PR: My first interest in coaching was as an undergrad at the University of Connecticut. I signed up for a coaching seminar hosted by The Athletics Congress [now USA Track and Field] at Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Connecticut, and the speaker was the late Art Gulden, who coached at Bucknell University. I was just fascinated with figuring out how things work with athletes, including with my own running. I worked all through the 1980s and early 1990s at the Craftsbury Running Camp in Northern Vermont, a center that’s very similar to ZAP and that’s where I met Andy, Zika’s late husband, Andy Palmer. That’s where I met Peter Pfitzinger, as well as wife-and-husband pair Craig and Kare Holm—all the people who influenced my coaching style and philosophy. I was fortunate that some people asked me to start working with them when I was only 19 or 20. I got the coaching bug when I was still an undergraduate.

MR: Would you classify your coaching style as primarily [Arthur] Lydiard-based?

PR: I guess if you had to pigeonhole my philosophy [laughing], I would say yes, but with all sorts of tweaking. The biggest thing for me is to cater the training to the individual. I’m fortunate to have only ten athletes to work with here at ZAP, which allows me to train each athlete vastly differently. Brendan O’Keefe, who was chronically injured at Brown University, runs probably 40-45 miles a week on the average, and he spends 8-10 hours a week cross-training, just to stay healthy, whereas someone like Kyle King, a 5K runner, runs 100 to 110 miles a week.

MR: That is vastly different and individualized.

PR: It’s very individualized. It’s day-to-day, it’s feedback from them and teaching by me, but yes, if you had to pigeonhole it, it would be based on what Lydiard taught the world four decades ago.

MR: How do you get feedback from the athletes?

PR: First and foremost, just by speaking to them every day. Zika and I live one mile from here, and we’re here working all day. I see them not just once a day, but almost all day every day. So, I have the opportunity to ask them how they feel.

The other thing is that we meet as a team for practice every single day. Zika and I drive down here every morning, pick them up, and drive them to the lake, and I get to watch them run every day, which lets me see how they’re doing.

MR: That’s a unique opportunity. Let’s backtrack and talk a bit about the distance summit you had here a few years ago, when you had several coaches come and talk about ways in which to promote distance running here in the United States.

PR: That was really Zika’s idea. When ZAP first started in 2002, she saw that everybody was pretty much doing their own thing, and she wanted to bring the coaches from all the developmental clubs together to share concerns, ideas, and how we can best go forward for the developmental elites. We’re not necessarily talking about the top-top-tier athletes, but the elites that were biting and clawing just to get to races and pay their bills. We’re talking about the athletes that were coming to places like ZAP, or the Indiana Invaders, or Team USA Monterey Bay, at the time. We wanted to get together and see if we could learn more from each other.

It really opened our eyes to the fact that we were on the right track with the program, but also to the things that we weren’t doing well.

MR: And from what I’ve read, it sounds like you did learn a lot!

PR: Yeah, it was great. We had people here with many different perspectives, Keith Hanson came, and Jim Spivey,who was coaching at Vanderbilt at the time. Ray Flynn came out and gave us a little talk on the business side of the sport from an agent’s perspective; that was great. Bob Sevene was there, and so were Greg Harger from the Indiana Invaders and Dennis Barker from Team USA Minnesota. John Conley, the race director for the Freescale [Austin] Marathon, and Jack Wickens, who’s now with the USATF Foundation, were there, too. It was a great mix of people.

MR: In what particular ways were you on the right track?

PR: Well, having our athletes living and training together as a group day in and day out was a good thing. The energy that they could feed off each other works. It works for Terrence’s [Mahon] group [Team Running USA]; it works with the Hansons [Hansons-Brooks Distance Project], and it works here. Everyone has improved here, and I think that most of the success is from simply the energy of being around other athletes who are chasing the same thing, even if it’s in a different event.

One thing that we learned we needed to do better was planning things for athletes not just six months or 10 months out, but looking two to three years in advance as to where you’d like the athlete to be.

MR: That’s a great perspective. Let’s take a couple of your athletes as examples and talk about your plans for them for the next few years.

PR: Sure. Thomas Morgan came out of the University of Kentucky, which is a very middle-distance-oriented program. He didn’t run particularly high mileage as a collegiate; he ran 40-50 miles a week. When he first arrived, we talked about where we wanted to be in four, six, eight years. Ultimately, we’re targeting the 5000 meters and what I believe he’s going to need to do to get there, which is slowly increasing his volume each and every year in a way that will keep him healthy, and also introducing things that perhaps he didn’t do a lot of before, such as drills and core work, and more than anything, focusing on running as a career, not just something you do on the side.

MR: The notion of realizing running as a career delves into the psychology of being a professional runner. How do you help runners to recognize themselves as professional athletes?

PR: It’s very hard to do. We’ve had athletes in our program struggle with seeing this as their job; it’s always “this is something on the side.” When they’ve been here for six months to a year, they start to see that their living is made this way [by running]. Their room and board are paid for; their salary and health insurance are paid for; their travel is paid for, so they are indeed making their living here at ZAP. But I won’t lie, it’s a struggle to get them to see it as a career, especially when a good year can sometimes mean $12,000 [laughing].

MR: But they don’t have many expenses, either, which makes $12,000 more than decent.

PR: That’s true; the athletes in our program are fully funded. They don’t have many expenses. The ZAP Fitness Foundation pretty much covers everything for them, but for the most part, they are not walking away with much extra.

MR: I know that one of the ways that the foundation earns money for the professional athletes is through the adult fitness camps; are there other ways that the foundation earns money?

PR: Yes. Our funding is unique compared to other developmental programs. About half of our funding comes from tax-deductible donations from everywhere—people we meet at races, friends from the old days in the ‘80s, like Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Greg Meyer, and all the people who knew Andy, and people who come up and spend a few evenings here at ZAP Fitness. The other half of our profits come from the facility itself—the adult running camps that we put on, and all of the high school and college track and cross country teams that we host all year.

MR: Let’s talk a bit about injury prevention. It seems that your group of runners has been quite healthy the past couple of years.

PR: We’ve been fortunate for the most part, but in any given year, each of our athletes deals with something. Our first goal for each of our athletes is to finish the year healthy, because if you can do that year after year, the performance goals will come.

MR: What sorts of things to you incorporate into the athletes’ training and lifestyle to help them prevent injuries?

PR: Probably 95 percent of our training is on groomed carriage trails in Moses Cone Park, so that helps us a ton. A 100-mile week on the trails beats you up less than a 70-mile week on the pavement, so we can definitely do more with less pounding. Also, our athletes have the time to focus on the small maintenance issues—things like icing, using our spin machine or calf-massage machine, or running into town to get a massage, little things that you might skip out on if you had to go off to work after your run.

MR: How often do the athletes strength-train, and does that vary depending on where they are in their training schedules?

PR: Good question. It varies based on the athlete and also on the time of year. Zika leads our athletes through the work in the weight room. It’s generally three days a week, a session of about an hour after they come home from their harder runs. For the most part, it’s stuff in the middle of the body. We don’t spend a lot of time lifting heavy weights, but we do a lot of core work, and regular drill work throughout the year as well.

MR: What are some specific drills that you do?

PR: Things like lunges, [laughing] spiders, toe-ups, back steps…

MR: I have to admit that I don’t know what spiders are.

PR: [laughing] It’s walking sideways low to the ground. It’s this sort of thing [demonstrates] to work on hamstrings and hip flexors. We do box step-ups and hurdle-overs. Our drills aren’t particularly explosive—more coordination-based drills. Most of the drills were taught to me by Bob Sevene, actually.

MR: I read an article that was published shortly after the Distance Summit, where all of the attendees were asked where they could envision distance running going by 2008. You mentioned the 5K and Bob Kennedy, and you said that the 24th-fastest time could be 13:27. As of recently, the top five or six 5K runners in the US are under 13:27. What do you think needs to happen to get more athletes to run such fast 5Ks?

PR: Well, to put things in perspective, coming into Nationals this year, Kyle King had run 13:33.4 and they [the USATF] decided they were going to take the top 18 runners to compete, and we weren’t sure if Kyle was going to get in, and the time had to have been run in the last 12 months. If you take that same time of 13:33.4 back in 2003, that would have put Kyle in the top five or six. So the depth of 5K and 10K running at least in the men’s field has just gone batty, which is great to see. The Bob Kennedys of the world, and the Adam Gouchers, and the Bernard Lagats will always be there. I think the depth on that second tier, the high 13:20s to the low 13:40s, that depth has gotten so great, that every once in a while, one of those guys will break out and run 13:20. This is much like the Hansons’ theory that the more 2:12 to 2:15 marathoners you have, ultimately, the more 2:08 to 2:10 guys you’ll have. For us, in relative terms, I’ve seen the same thing for 5K runners.

MR: And what do you think has contributed to that?

PR: I believe that the training that our country moved away from in the ‘80s is now returning, from the late ‘90s until now. In the 1960s and 1970s, our athletes’ total training volume was much more than it was in the 1980s until the mid-‘90s. I believe that coaches were told in the 80s that they could run less and achieve the same, and I wholeheartedly disagree. While it’s relative for each athlete, I believe largely that the more you run, the better you’ll be.

MR: And with the athletes who are injury-prone, like Brendan O’Keefe, do you think that the volume of cross-training helps them to achieve better results?

PR: Absolutely. Brendan O’Keefe runs 100 miles a week, but it’s just that his legs don’t. His heart does, though. Most of his training on a weekly basis is done in the pool, on the stationary bike, or even on the elliptical machine. Nothing replaces running like running, but in the absence of being able to run, I’ll get that aerobic fitness somewhere else.

MR: What are your thoughts on training with heart-rate monitors?

PR: We don’t use heart-rate-monitor training—not that it isn’t a great tool; it can be. I just feel from the psychological side, I want running to be simple and joyful [chuckling], and I feel that if you’re too scientific or too technical, you take away from that simple childlike joy of running.

MR: Good point. So, what are your favorite aspects of coaching?

PR: I’d say that my favorite aspect of coaching is the relationships with the athletes. There’s nothing I’d rather do than meet athletes at the park every day and watch them run. I also love the puzzle aspect of coaching, putting together a program and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Even though I come to the table with some very strong beliefs on how distance runners should be trained, a lot of what I’ve done is based on trial and error, and tweaking things month to month, year to year, cycle to cycle.

MR: So, what sort of cycles do you use for your runners?

PR: I tend to do two large cycles a year, generally, a strength-based fall cycle. We tend to underemphasize racing in the fall. In fact, I try to underemphasize racing throughout the year. I’m not a believer in racing a whole lot. For the fall-based cycle, I try to help the athletes improve general conditioning and aerobic fitness, and improve anaerobic threshold as well, with a late-fall peak. I’ll take our athletes to a couple of races like the Manchester Road Race, or club nationals in cross country, generally downplaying the fall, and working off that continued winter strength into a spring racing season. For post-collegians, the spring racing season starts a lot later than it would for a collegian.

MR: Now that we’ve talked about professional runners, let’s talk about distance runners in general. One thing that a lot of runners struggle with is how to incorporate variety, whether it be in terrain, in volume, or in intensity. What would you suggest as a first thing for a distance runner to do in order to vary workouts?

PR: It’s funny that you should ask that. In our first week of adult running camp here, the first talk that we gave—when I say we, I’m referring to myself and Bob Sevene, who was our guest coach—was about working on different aspects of training at different times during the year. I believe that most runners tend to go out to the park every day or the road, and they run their 4 or 5 mile run every day at the same pace, and if the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then there’s a lot of stupid people out there [laughing].

I would encourage people to spend a portion of their year running relaxed and easy. When I say easy, I mean under 75 percent of their max heart rate, and spend a portion of their year where they incorporate some quicker work or sustained work, say 85 percent of their max heart rate or a tempo run, or even simple things like fartleks. I think the general public would find their running improving a great deal if once a week they threw in a random fartlek: “Hey I’m going to pick it up to the mailbox, and then jog easy to the dog, then pick it up to the next telephone pole” and just play with varied pacing.

The other thing is that I don’t think even recreational runners know how to rest. I think it’s important to take some time every year and really rest and allow their bodies to recover, even a few weeks off, completely.

MR: So you’re referring to varied training and rest not within a week, but within the year as a whole?

PR: Yes. I coach a handful of runners around the country from their 30s to their 70s, and I have most of them take up to a month a year where they don’t run a step.

MR: Do you have them do some light cross-training?

PR: I have them do cross-training as part of their running program, but in that month, I don’t have them do anything.

MR: Do you find that that’s hard for people to do?

PR: It’s harder for the recreational runners to do than the elite athletes. Generally the elite runners, when they finish their European season or the marathon, and you have them take a big block of time off, most of them relish it.

MR: The last thing I’ll ask you is about educating yourself. I know that you value education for coaches. How do you continue to educate yourself?

PR: Primarily by picking up the phone all the time and asking other coaches what they think about what I’m doing with my athletes. I don’t think an athlete can serve two masters, but I think the master is naïve if he—or she—thinks he knows it all. I ask a lot of questions, particularly of Bob Sevene, who’s my coach and mentor 100 percent. I can ask him anything about an athlete, like “Do you think this workout fits well in the cycle?” and he’ll flat-out tell me, in his own unique way [laughing].

In addition to that, I go to a lot of coaching seminars. I went to a great seminar this spring called the Running Medicine Seminar at the University of Virginia to learn more about running injuries, and how to recover from them. And the USATF coaching clinics are excellent; they really are, and many of them are on this side of the country, which is great.

MR: Is there anything you’d like to add?

PR: Sure. What I think is really neat about our program is that when we have groups in here, someone who runs a 7-hour marathon and wants to lose weight might have an athlete who runs a 13:30 5K washing her dishes and making her beds. [ZAP athletes must commit 15-20 hours a week of work at the facility whether it’s writing updates for the website, mowing the grass, weeding the garden, mopping the floors, etc.] It’s a unique marriage to connect the recreational runner with the elite runner. Our athletes usually start the first half-mile with the campers.

MR: Do the athletes have favorite chores?

PR: Everybody loves riding the tractor to mow the grass. and everybody seems to hate the weeding.

Interview conducted July 6, 2007, and posted July 17, 2007.

Pete Rea