Running Times, Online

by Ellen Wessel

Next year will be Moving Comfort’s 30th anniversary. Last week at The Running Event Conference and Trade Show in Austin, Texas, Elizabeth Goeke and I had the slightly surreal but extraordinarily joyful experience of being honored by independent running retailers, several of whom had been our customers for nearly as long as Moving Comfort has been in existence: Super Jock ‘n Jill in Seattle, WA;, Track Shack in Orlando, FL;, Gazelle Sports in Grand Rapids, MI; Bob Roncker’s Running Spot, Cincinnati, OH; First Place Sports, Jacksonville, FL.

Together we have witnessed the migration of the women’s market from the edges to the solid center of the running industry. In the late 70’s women might have been 10-15% of the customers shopping at running stores. Today we are frequently more than 50% of the buyers. Elizabeth and I were very proud to stand before our peers having always had women as 100% of our customer base.

March 13, 1977 is Moving Comfort’s official birth date. In 1977, there was no women’s marathon in the Olympics. Title IX was just 5 years old. Elvis Presley supposedly died. On March 13, we put $75 down on a Singer sewing machine so we could fulfill orders from our teammates in the Washington RunHers, an all-female running club founded in Fall 1976.

I’m not proud to say that not only didn’t we have a business plan, I wasn’t even familiar with the concept of one. Like everything else I’d plunged into, including running, I wholeheartedly believed that what we were doing made perfect sense so why waste precious time developing a blueprint? We didn’t stop to consider that it would be wise to think about where we were going. No one else was making women’s running clothes, we were women runners, and we had lots of friends who were women runners. There was demand and no supply. Knowing how or if we could make a profit was beside the point. We had a mission. We put one foot in front of the other and found answers as questions arose.

The starting point for the world’s first-ever women’s running short was a commercial pattern for women’s Bermuda shorts. This at least gave us the appropriate proportions for the hips and waist. We were on our own from there. Our shorts were appropriately short. And we added what would become a signature detail—a buttoned back pocket large enough to carry id and tp. (Long runs rarely went uninterrupted by visits to the bushes.)

We got our first fabric from the same place as the patterns—the local sewing shop. Buttons and thread, ditto. We bought what we needed for the custom orders—a few yards at a time of soft, lightweight fabrics, mostly nylons and polyesters, standard buttons, a few spools of thread.

That was fine when we were doing custom orders one and two at a time. But then those running shops found out about us through that ad in Running Times and requested the catalog that didn’t yet exist. Pulling the catalog together was not a problem. Filling the orders was. We had to find a more practical, profitable source for raw materials and we needed more hands to sew the garments.

My step-father represented a large textile mill. He made his living selling fabrics to manufacturers. He got us in the door, enabling us to meet directly with the mills. We had no idea how truly puny our business was until we went to New York City to shop for what we learned were called Piece Goods (fabrics) and Trims (buttons, thread).

Twenty-six year old me made the trip, appropriately dressed for a first job interview—pumps(!?), skirt, shirt, jacket and briefcase in hand. I placed an order for 100 yards of terry cloth[sic]. This was huge. I visited a button wholesaler. I thought it would impress the salesman that I was in the market for, say, 1000 buttons. People in the rag business don’t talk in units, they talk in dozens. Who knew? I was encouraged to take my business down the street to Woolworth’s (a once enormously successful and ubiquitous chain of five and dime stores that closed its last U.S. locations in 1997).

When the truck showed up with the 100 yards of fabric, I learned another thing: Truckers deliver piece goods to the street. They don’t stop to help the young ladies haul the fabric up a flight of stairs to the apartment.

Assembling a network of sewers was another necessity of growth. We placed an ad for home sewers in the Washington Post. We got four, so widely dispersed that it took a full day of driving to get to each home. Our routine was thus: We’d cut several layers of fabric at a time on the kitchen table. Using plastic sandwich bags, we created individual kits with cut pieces of fabric, a button, waistband elastic and our woven label with our brand name and our logo, a little running girl stick figure who was our mascot for about 15 years. (As a heat-transfer label, she had a tendency to lose a leg, arm or lock of hair after repeated laundering. Lacking integrity, she got cut from the team in the late 80’s.) At the beginning of the week, I’d spend the whole day delivering the little kits. At the end of the week, I’d make the same all-day tour, picking up and paying for the finished garments.

In 1980 we were manufacturing in South Carolina. By the mid 80’s we were doing much of our production in Pennsylvania. In the late 90’s, Central America. Today, most of Moving Comfort is produced in Asia. Product integrity hasn’t changed, nor has Moving Comfort’s mission to make clothes that inspire women to get fit and stay fit. Speaking of which, now that I’m in my 50’s, I’m finding that I have to work out even harder and definitely smarter than I did in my 20’s, darn it. No matter how much effort it might take to get through a workout, though, there’s no other feeling as satisfying as having done it.

by Mark Aaron Locken

Regular exercise can be a means of experiencing weight loss, lower resting heart rate (RHR), higher energy level, stress relief, and prevention of illness. However, the athlete who does not obtain the necessary amount of rest runs the risk of not only missing out on these benefits but actually experiencing the opposite effects.

People often begin an exercise program or continue in one because regular exercise can help a person manage weight. Overtraining, however, can have the opposite effect. A person increasing their amount of exercise is likely to have an increase in appetite. The body is burning energy and it wants that energy replaced. Widely respected nutritionist and author, Nancy Clark, MS, RD, says it is very common for (even) endurance athletes to gain weight during intense training periods. This may seem counter-intuitive but it happens.

A fitness routine can lower one’s resting heart rate and other vital signs. Moderate training improves cardiac vagal activity and thus has a cardio protective effect. However, there is little evidence to substantiate the efficacy of rigorous training as a means to further protect the heart. Some experts even caution that prolonged periods of intense exercise may unfavourably alter neuroendocrine, neuromuscular, and cardiovascular function. In plain speak: too much exercise can result in heart and muscle fatigue that causes an elevation of RHR.

Researchers followed eight professional cyclists through the 15 stages of the Tour of Spain bicycle race in 2001. Several health indexes were tracked, including RHR. The researchers found that during stages 1-9, there was no significant change in RHR of the eight competitors. During stages 10-15, there were modest increases to RHR, even in these elite performers. Obviously, a one-time study of eight persons cannot be considered conclusive but should at least be considered corroborative.

Corroborative of what? There is some evidence that shows strength athletes are not immune to experiencing elevated RHR during extended periods of over-reaching. As the physical stress accumulates, the parasympathetic symptoms (responses the body uses to gradually return itself to a normal state) usually experienced by endurance athletes and the sympathetic symptoms (body responses to a shock or trauma) experienced by strength athletes often intertwine such that it is difficult to tell the two apart. This effect could mean that stress is stress, regardless of the delivery mechanism.

Some persons use exercise to manage mental stress. One cannot forget that exercise is itself a stressor. Add to the physical dimension the mental dimension of desiring to run faster or sink a jump shot and the stress level goes even higher. Both physical and mental stressors may create a need for training days of reduced intensity in order to restore energy. A 2002 study of 29 collegiate swimmers during a 24-week season noted that levels of anger were directly related to training volume in a dose-response fashion. As the training stimulus increased, so did the level of mood disturbance.

There exists an inverse relationship between training load and energy level. You train farther, faster, heavier, whatever, and there will be an increased expenditure of energy. The result is fatigue. The cumulative effect of repeated high intensity bouts of exercise can build up quickly, resulting in what is commonly termed “over-reaching”. This is an important part of training but so is recovery. Going right to the edge of where over-reaching becomes “over-training,” is a desirable but dangerous position as the effects of over-training can be disastrous.

Over-training has many negative consequences, including catabolism, a physiological state in which the body seeks to meet its metabolic needs by using muscle for energy. Often, continuous training causes over-use injuries such as plantar fasciitis or bursitis. The list of common over-use injuries is a lengthy one.

Exercise is a potent way to boost the immune system. Among the positive benefits is that it raises the level of natural killer cells that suppress certain types of cancer. Dr. David Nieman, an immunologist at Appalachian State University, adds that exercise is particularly important for the elderly. He writes that 50% of sedentary elderly persons reported regularly suffering from colds, coughs, and other viral infections as opposed to 21% of elderly walkers and 8% of highly fit seniors. Nieman also reports information showing that heavy exertion increases an athlete’s risk of upper respiratory tract infections (URTI) because of negative changes in immune function, including elevated levels of epinephrine and cortisol.

This decrease in ability to overcome infection seems to be a function related to exercise duration. Several research groups seem to agree that the relationship of exercise to immune function is non-linear. Initially, exercise seems to cause immune levels to rise. However, as duration and/or intensity increases, there is a negative impact on the body’s ability to fight disease, particularly URTI’s. Decreased rest may exacerbate the effect.

So what does all of this mean? It means that light to moderate exercise is a good thing – a VERY good thing. A person can look better, feel better, sleep better, and won’t get sick as often. If you want to be a competitive athlete, you will have to challenge yourself with brief periods of over-reaching followed by periods of light training and one or two days a week of complete rest. Lengthy periods of over-reaching result in over-training and precipitate the numerous maladies described earlier. Exercise. Train hard. – And rest!