RunnersDaily.co.uk Daily Running News & Links

After our look at the value, or otherwise of Pilates for runners, Runnersdaily casts its jaundiced eye over yoga as an adjunct to your run training.

The first thing to point out is that there are several styles of yoga. According to the British Wheel of Yoga, there are the ‘classical’ types, which have 11 varieties, and the modern styles, which number seven. That adds up to 18. The best known classical style of yoga, most practised in the west, is ‘hatha’ yoga. That would be the style my nan used to do in the 70s, then. The trendiest style is bikram yoga, which isn’t even on the British Wheel of Yoga’s list, (that makes 19 yogas, then) and which is carried out in a heated room.

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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.

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If you were running in one of Europe’s premier marathons this weekend and you ran out of fuel at the 20-mile mark…would you be hitting the Berlin Wall?

I’d just like to thank my family, agent and manager for supporting me through the long preparation period of that joke, my editor for working on the wording and my gag writer for co-writing it, as well as my calendar manager for making sure that it was released to the world’s laughter-starved millions on the right Friday, just before the Berlin Marathon and not the London Marathon, although my Wall Joke Advisor informs me that there is a London Wall (constructed mainly from Kentish Ragstone) that would do very well for a similar joke next spring.

So now you’ve been ‘cheered up’, on with the link round-up.

1. Haile Gebrselassie forewent the Olympic Marathon in order to attempt to break his own world marathon record at Berlin, where he set his mark of 2:04:26 last year. Here’s a scientific look at whether it’s possible, let down a little by the fact that there are no Berlin Wall/marathon wall jokes in it.
2. I love my coffee, always have - but are caffeinated energy drinks the thin end of the wedge? Here’s a blog and educated debate about whether teenagers, at whom Red Bull and the rest are targeted, should have their cans labelled with caffeine content.
3. What with Andy Baddeley winning the Dream Mile, and now Lisa Dobriskey winning the Fith Avenue Mile, maybe British miling is on the up again. Here’s a chat with Dobriskey about her victory.
4. Ron Hill is soon to celebrate his 70th birthday. One of Britain’s greatest marathoners (and sports textile innovator), he is perhaps better known for his ’streak’ - not nude running, but running every day without fail. Ron’s streak is a phenomenal 44 years. Here is a feature on the man.
5. Finally, a little more humour to brighten your day - what do you mean there hasn’t been any yet? Cheeky - with this spoof of Usain Bolt.

Have a great weekend, happy racing and training.

Nice title. Could almost have been devised to get the most search engine hits or bookshop queries. It reminds me of a book by the English humorist Alan Coren, who, when research told him that the best selling books were on golf, cats and the Nazis, titled his next collection of stories ‘Golfing for Cats’, with a cover illustration of a cat hitting a golf ball, wearing a swastika-emblazoned uniform. Needless to say, within the book there is no golf, no cats and and no Nazis.

Which is uncannily similar to the relationship between title and content of this book by Geoff Hollister, which is as much about Geoff Hollister as anything else. Chapter 18 begins with how huge Nike were by 1982, rendering the ‘Out of Nowhere’ part of the title redundant for nearly half the book. Not long after this point, much space is devoted to Hollister’s efforts to design the Aquasock for windsurfers, and market sailing clothing to sailors, as well as Nike’s advances in basketball and (American) football. So the ‘Culture of Running’ part dribbles away about there. Generally, the book is a vehicle for the author to  write down a lot of his personal life - which, since he worked for Nike pretty much from day one, is certainly closely entwined with that company, but which is still his personal life. It takes four chapters before we hear anything about Bowerman’s efforts to get better shoes for his runners, five chapters before Nike founder Phil Knight emerges; we need to endure Hollister’s Navy service too before the seminal ‘waffle iron’ moment, when Bowerman poured rubber into a waffle iron to create a new type of running sole. If this is the historic point at which Nike is born, even though there was at that time no name and only the beginnings of a business, then we have to wade through an awful lot of gratuitous anecdotes to get there.

So if the title was an exam question, then the book would lose marks for not answering it. Yes, it’s about Nike, and yes, it’s about Geoff Hollister. But is it any good? Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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The weekend - 48 hours of Bacchanalia, hedonism, sleaze… and maybe a little running - lies ahead. So we’ll start our weekly link round-up with a quite different 48 hours…

1. In the world of ultrarunning Dean Karnazes is a figure of some scorn - or maybe envy, since he is a self-marketing marvel. Aiming to break the record for the furthest distance run on a treadmill in 48 hours was his latest stunt.
2. Talking about self-marketing marvels, a reminder of how last week (yes, this was in the round-up) Carl Lewis revved up the motor on his mouth with a few choice opinions on the Jamaican sprinting phenomenon.
3. And then Pat Butcher had a word or two himself on the subject of Carl Lewis. Maybe this will start a big war of words.
4. If your weekend is, like mine, a near unending cascade of sensuous delights of every possible description, then you might like to pay attention to the concept of naked weight loss.
5. Finally, if your weekend pleasures involve retail therapy, you have several tens of pounds burning a hole in your pocket and you fancy some new shoes, then here is a totally unbiased review of some Nike shoes from the Nike running website.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve just been rifling through my library of books on coaching, training, running, triathlon, fitness, rehab and linguistics trying to find who advocated the Asian squat as the single best stretching exercise for a runner. And it doesn’t appear to have been Joe Friel, Jack Daniels or Noam Chomsky. No matter.

Take a look at those chaps above, passing the time of day having a nice squat. They happen to be Asian, but people assume this position in Africa, the Americas and Australia too. It’s one of the ways humans have tended to ’sit’ since we evolved. Squatting is a very, very fundamental human movement (especially when having a Movement, which on a good day might be an Olympic Movement…) yet it seems that we westerners sit in the notorious ‘double right-angle’ position rather than squat (both for chatting and for number 2s) to the extent that even as early as the teenage years many people have lost the knack. It has taken several months for some of the teenagers I coach to get down into full squats as seen above.

This is a shame. The position you see above is worth practising and perfecting. Heels flat, by the way, not like the amateur at left of the picture. If you have tight calves, tight hamstrings tight glutes and, sorry or, a tight low back, then this could be the exercise for you. I used to get my inflexible young runners to practise with their backs close to a wall so that they were supported when, as always happened at the beginning, they toppled over backwards.

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To count a few blessings: I’ve got my health, a roof over my head and food in my belly, and when I returned to Wimbledon Common to run the 5k event again, the pervasive smell of dog shit had disappeared. And not only all those things, but I had a shiny new pair of Vibram Fivefingers Sprints to help me get around the 5k course. Life is good, man, life is good.

In a nutshell: one minute and 15 seconds faster than a fortnight ago, which works out at 15 seconds per kilometre. Good, eh?

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The kids have all trudged wanly back to the bearpits of school, the grey autumn winds prise the tans off our very skins with their chill fingers…oh, and the international track season draws to a close. The Golden League jackpot has been won, and this weekend that slightly confusing concept that is the World Athletics Finals takes place in Stuttgart for the last time.

1. Let’s start with the Golden League. Not quite zero to hero, but Pamela Jelimo’s rise has been truly meteoric.
2. The brightest star of the summer has been Usain Bolt, and the media is crammed with stuff about him, yet this piece on him manages to entertain and inform in equal measure.
3. If ever there was a warning about keeping going through ‘bad pain’ - rather than what we might call ‘good pain’ - then this, horrifically, is it.
4. Carl Lewis has never been one to rev down the motor attached to his mouth, and here he is outrageously candid about recent sprint performances.
5. In the wake of Pat Butcher’s ‘boring’ tag for Tirunesh Dibaba, there is a piece looking at her marketability in relation to her talent.

Have a great weekend, happy running and happy racing!

It’s always good to have a cynic’s view of something that is widely accepted. The something is Pilates, for runners, and the cynic in question is Dr Mel Siff, a South African academic and athlete who delighted - he died an early death - in questioning the accepted wisdom and exploding the myths of anything to do with training in any form. (And me, too, speaking on his behalf, as someone who is mistrustful of ’systems’).

Pilates is just such an area of fitness. It has an aura and a mystique that seem to give it far greater credibility than it might deserve, considering it is primarily a form of strength training; athletes often mention they’re taking it up, or ask me if it will help them become better runners or triathletes, and the underlying assumption that it will annoys me. There is plenty of received wisdom in the heads of the running community that Pilates ‘gives you an edge’ to quote a commercial ‘Pilates for runners’ website. The same site lists the following benefits:

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