26.2 Ways to Run

I think racing the way we're used to is gone forever. There! I've said it. No more long queues at the portaloos before the start. No more corrals with 1,000 runners touching, shaking hands, and wishing each other luck. No more post-race hugs and tears, not unless you're part of the same household. So let's reverse engineer a race and see if we can come up with a picture Social distancing So, there are 10,000 of us converging into one spot in the city. How can you make sure we all observe social distancing? That's a bit of an issue unless we're running in the desert or high in the mountains where there are acres to spare.  The queueing system We start by creating an orderly queue. In fact, we create many orderly queues around the access area to prevent overcrowding. First of all, the zone must be cordoned off for the queue system to work. Otherwise, everybody does what everybody does when there's no system in place: we invade the zone. So, all ru...

The Coronavirus pandemic has forced us to add new roles to our lives (teacher, cook, cleaner, entertainer, dog walker, you get the idea) and re-evaluate what performance means under those circumstances. In my previous post , I compared the current situation to training for a marathon and being asked to run an Ironman instead. It's doable but don't expect high performance in every discipline. How does that pan out to running? Let's face it, at the moment, there are many variables outside our control and we have to find the way to make the most of the opportunities we have, whether it is running-related or life in general. Identify the constraints I was reaching the end of the training cycle for the Paris marathon when the announcement of the cancellation came (that is 4 weeks before the race). I remember that Sunday I ran the Bohermeen half marathon as my last pre-marathon race. One day I had a race obejctive in mind, the next day I had no race and tons of disappoinmen...

COVID-19 re-defined what normal is It's day 852 of the COVID19 quarantine. People on Instagram have stopped posting photos of cute and crazy ideas they've come up with and replaced them with old holiday pictures of what normal used to be. Being a runner, I've started going through my Garmin log to look at the stats of all the races I can't do at the moment with the same affection. We lost our sense of purpose At the start of our quarantine in Ireland, I was mostly frustrated by the fact that the Paris marathon had been cancelled 4 weeks before the big day. All the training I had done was going to the bin and I didn't know what to do about it. My big goal had been taken away from me.  With only 4 weeks to go before the marathon, my training was coming along nicely and I felt confident I could achieve a new PB. I had just run the Bohermeen half marathon with a new PB   and all of the sudden, boom! There was nothing to train for, no Paris, no purpose. I...

Following up from my last post , I have been giving some thought to the topic of teenagers and sport. Having a teenager in the house has taught me a thing or two about the way in which us parents, create a work ethic that will help them later in life, and the struggles we go through in order to turn actions into habits. Be the example We're all familiar with the old saying "Do as I say, not as I do" and it makes sense in a convoluted way, but not to a teenager. Imagine we tell them to get off the phone/tablet/Playstation and go to bed early, but they see us staying up till midnight browsing Facebook in bed. It sounds hypocritical, right? To a teenager, this feeling is amplified tenfold. If, on the other hand, we get proper rest, if we are commited to training, to fueling properly and we can show the results consistently, there's a better chance of the message sticking in their minds. Responsibility is personal When my son was younger, we would always mak...

Last week, during a professional development session I was asked to draw a picture of a future where I could do whatever I wanted, so I said I would love to write. The coach said "Could you do that now?" "So why don't you?" I had a bagful of the usual excuses: I don't have time; I don't have anything to write about; I don't know how to, etc. but I said "I'll try". Since I had that conversation, I've spent a lot of time, mostly during my runs, thinking of a suitable topic I could exploit, and finally something came up. So here I am, a week later, dusting off the cobwebs of this blog and trying to get the creative juices running to write about the only thing (or one of the very few things)  that fills my brains in between doses of work, sleep and living in general. Social life Over the last 8 or 9 years, my whole life has been so dominated by running that I wouldn't know what to do without it. Thanks to it, my social...