58. On the road with Betsy and Bryan

Running tip #58

As promised, today’s running tip is drink coffee 60-90 minutes before you race to markedly enhance your performance.  Runner’s World magazine offers 8 things runners should know about coffee and I’m going to give you one more.

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Coffee is the perfect pit stop.  My partners in road-racing crime back in the 90’s, Betsy and Bryan, had the ideal coffee system worked out.  Halfway through some 6-hour road trip to, say, Charleston West Virginia for the 15k US championships, we’d stop at a gas station and Bryan would drop the tailgate on his blue Ford truck, pull out a bag of freshly ground coffee beans, some filters, and a couple of one-cup pour-over thingys (see photo above b/c I don’t know what they’re called).  Bryan would head into the Quickee Mart and purchase two large styrofoam cups of boiling hot water (at 10 cents per cup, you can’t beat the price) then quickly rush back to pour the hot water over the coffee into three ceramic mugs (I still have mine!).  Next, Bryan would use his pocket knife to jimmy open a tiny 5oz can of condensed milk … just enough for three of us.

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Of course, we had to have cookies with our coffee so the final touch on a perfect pit stop was when Betsy shared her biscuits!

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