Variety is the spice of running. Just as running in different types of shoes will challenge and stimulate your biomechanics, so will varying the surfaces you run on. You become more durable, with better lower leg strength and sharper reflexes. A more complete runner, let’s say. Runnersdaily casts a critical eye over what’s out there.
There’s been a lull as summer eases its way out and autumn glides in. The long evenings and bright early mornings are receding and as the air becomes a little brisker each day, we start to reset our sights on a new season of racing. It might be cross-country, it might be a few road 5ks and 10ks as we build towards a spring marathon.
Preparing the mind can be the hard part of race readiness. Physically you might be in great shape yet fail to achieve your goals on race day. Usually that difference between race outcome and the quality of condition you were in as you toed the line is down to mental preparation. So Runnersdaily present 10 tips to help you get more from your fitness on race day.
I’m worried about you. Are you in good health? Dunno, depends on your definition of good health, you mutter in a surly undertone…
Well, let’s aim high, and shoot for a physique like Mark Foster (men) or Yelena Isinbayeva (women), 8-10% body fat, an immune system as robust as Bruce Parry’s and enough energy to outlast my three-year-old daughter on her birthday weekend (I have just tried, and failed…please help). And if you fall short of those lofty goals, at least the fact that you run regularly means you are ok. Does it?
Fit you may be, but fitness and good health don’t necessarily go hand in hand. To awaken your inner hypochondriac, here are 10 conditions that may not be obvious, but which may over time bring you down. Don’t think I’m scaremongering - the point of this post is to open your eyes to the fact that there can be quite a wide disconnect between being a competent runner and being in excellent health.
The last ‘10′ post urged you to find an uphill race and aim for the sky. Now we’re relenting a little, or at least indulging your desire for an absence of inclines. Running forums abound with the newbie query, ‘ Can anyone tell me which marathon is the flattest, so I can enter it as my first marathon?’ Leaving aside the assumption that unremitting horizontality for 26.2 miles is necessarily a good thing, we have come up with 10 marathons whose courses are as flat as the proverbial pancake, as level as a line of latitude, as even as a well-rolled cricket pitch… join the Flat Earth Marathon Society, bin hill training and enjoy:
PS Hill reps will still help with these namby-pamby superflat courses.
Happy running!
We have been fortunate enough to get some great comments on the most recent Runnersdaily post, and as a result I am amending the list to remove Geoff Hollister, who was not co-founder of Nike - Bill Bowerman was. I’m not putting Bowerman in the list, though, because he sometimes peed on his athletes’ legs when they were in the shower (according to Hollister’s memoir) and that disturbs me.
So I’m submitting the name of Wilma Rudolph. Rudolph won three golds in sprints at the Rome Olympics in 1960. She established the Wilma Rudolph Foundation to help disadvantaged achieve their sporting dreams. Rudolph herself, as a black woman, the 20th child of 22, growing up in America’s era of racial segregation and also suffering from polio as a child, had plenty of obstacles to overcome and her efforts helped American sports become more inclusive.
We are well acquainted with the Gebrselassies and Dibabas, the Bolts and Felixes, the Wariners and Richardses of the current crop of great runners. And the legends of the distant and recent past are still spoken of (and there’s always Youtube too, to relive world records and Olympic victories), the Coes and Ovetts, the Keinos and Shorters, Prefontaines and Benoits. Talent, dedication, a deep love of the sport of running and maybe a splash of luck are the ingredients to success.
But what of those who have shaped the world of running in other ways? Those who have led from the front, or pulled strings from above? Those who have fought battles or made fortunes from the sport. Here are 10 movers and shakers in running.
After our post on 10 Olympic disappointments, here are 10 of the biggest shocks in what seems to have been a pretty damn good Olympic games on the track, with not that many huge upsets. Another disappointment, of course, is waking up each day and not slumping out of bed and onto the sofa to watch the action in Beijing. Oh well, back to Cbeebies and Milkshake.
Here at Runnersdaily we have bowed to the inevitable and focused on the Olympic games, and it’s been excellent so far. But not everything goes well for every athlete, and we have shared the pain of these ten disappointments:
With the opening ceremony hitting TV screens on Friday, the Beijing Olympic Games are just a breath away. Yes, there are doping scandals, yes, the Chinese human rights policies, or lack of, are causing Tibet supporters to protest, but when battle commences on the track, it’s so hard not to get caught up in the titanic struggles between superb athletes. Often it boils down to a head-to-head rivalry, and there are very few overwhelming favourites in the Olympics, this or any other, because getting through the rounds, as in the sprints, and dealing with the stress and tension, often detract from the great one-off performance capacity of certain athletes. So while we know who has run the best time in a given event, it doesn’t mean that athlete will stand on top of the winner’s podium.
Here are 10 of the big battles that (probably) will make the stories in the Bird’s Nest Stadium.
A very old friend of mine lives in the idyllic French town of Annecy, set on a crystal-clear lake, and squeezed between plenty of mountains, large and small. One of my favourite runs, when I’m visiting, goes along the lake shore - flat, flat - then takes a little kink off the road and straight up the side of a steep mountain. You just run up, and up, and up, for a good half hour, so the session is 15 minutes to base of mountain, 30 minutes climbing (at least), 20 minutes down, 15 minutes home. With the flat bits in full sun, and the hard bit in cool shade. Perfect.
Or there was the time I was in Colorado, staying in a motel in Boulder Creek, a climb up from the well known town of Boulder. Now that was at altitude, and even after settling in, when I went for a run and turned out of the motel and headed along the road, I was never sure if the shortness of breath was due to getting higher or because the road went in one direction only - up. I think I ran up the side of a Rocky for nearly 40 minutes before the wheezing of my battered lungs became too much.
Or my ascent of Pena de Oroel, in the Spanish Pyrenees, in rugby shorts and squash shoes, which gave me the taste for long uphill runs (longer than hill reps, anyway).
There’s something devastatingly simple about a mountain run of this nature. As well as the nature, of course, which can be amazing. It’s you versus gravity. What could be purer? Where’s the downside? (Sorry). Here is a list of 10 races that are primarily in one direction only - to the exaltation of your soul as you reach higher and higher ground.
