Racing enough or too much?
I don’t think I raced enough in 2012.…
Is it war or is it fun?
I have read two articles today which overlapped in my mind and created this blog post. The first piece was from a recruitment consultant who was decrying the ubiquity of training programmes suggesting that ‘anything is possible’. The author of the piece wrote that this approach is hugely…
RunBreeze competition
The chaps at RunBreeze are great friends of this blog and have supplied products for reviews as well as offering advice and threatening to come out with me for a run on more than a few occasions. Now they have offered to send one of the visitors to…
Competing or Completing?
I spent a happy hour browsing running related videos online yesterday and one that I watched really struck a chord with me. It was the highlights of the 2010 Chicago marathon. I thought that the video was rather nicely made with sweeping panoramas of the runners and some…
Runner at the Sharp End #4: Ben Wickham
I first met Ben at the Hackney Marshes ParkRun where it became immediately obvious that we were quite evenly matched. At the time I was living in Hackney so Ben and I were neighbours and ended up running the same races a few times. I was immediately and…
The London marathon 2012
As I stood on the start line of the London marathon this year, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of fear. Obviously there was the usual butterflies associated with the desire to do my best, the knowledge that pain was inevitable, the worry that maybe I should have…
Pre-marathon advice from Catherine Wilding
Catherine Wilding is a 2:49 marathon runner who started running in 2003 and ran her first marathon in 2005. Two years later she was competing in the women’s elite race in London and toed the start line as part of the elite women’s field in New York, so…
Maybe the saddest story
I must admit that when Sammy Wanjiru really exploded onto the marathon scene and changed the way that Championship marathons were run by the way he attacked the Olympic marathon in Beijing, I didn’t know enough about the history of marathoning or the individuals who have played such…
A nice problem to have
Today in the Sunday Times there is a very small article about something that is undoubtedly a very big issue in the country in question: the problem that the Kenyan Olympic selectors have in choosing a team to send…
Never give up, never give in
Thanks to Marathon Talk for reminding me about this video – Steve Jones running in a 10,000m race in 1983 in Brussels. In my opinion this one of the most wonderful examples I have ever seen of pure grit, toughness and the refusal to give in. This is…