13 Jun 2021 | General running history |
My oldest athletics magazine is this copy of Athletic Review, dated November 1947. I received three copies of this magazine, this one and two from March and May 1948, when I purchased several years of Athletics Weekly magazines from a gentleman who kindly included...
21 May 2021 | Women's endurance running history, Women's marathon history |
March is Women’s History Month in the UK, USA and Australia. This year, I decided to mark Women’s History Month by sharing a story from women’s running history on social media each day. This turned out to be a much more time-consuming task than I had...
9 Apr 2021 | Running after fifty |
** Guest post ** Pam Storey writes about almost 40 years of running and how she progressed from fun runs to marathons and ultra marathons. An enthusiastic member of the 100 Marathon Club, Pam has completed over 200 races of marathon or ultra distance and has every...
21 Mar 2021 | Running after fifty |
** Guest post ** – Joyce Bell from Kent writes about how she finally became a runner in her early sixties. Within a few years of her first parkrun, she ran a marathon and surprised herself by qualifying to represent England as a Masters athlete. I met Joyce at...
21 Feb 2021 | Women's endurance running history, Women's ultrarunning history |
An ultramarathon in a shopping mall Until 1994, nearly all shops in the UK were closed on Sunday by law. Small “corner shops” and newsagents, garden centres, chemists and and garages were allowed to open but large shops were not. This meant that the big shopping...
7 Feb 2021 | Running after fifty |
** Guest post ** I am very pleased to share this article by Ais North who started running at 64 in 2014 and soon found out that her preferred distance was ultras. Ais is one of a small number of women over 60 who are challenging ageist attitudes about the physical...
26 Jan 2021 | Women's endurance running history |
The subtitle of Ally Beaven’s book, “Broken”, is “2020: the year running records were rewritten”. 2020, our first year of living with Covid-19, was a year when plans were thrown in the bin and runners looked for new ways of motivating themselves to keep running and...
7 Jan 2021 | My running story |
After thousands of miles, runs in the dark, runs on icy pavements, dozens of muddy, slippery cross country races, tens of thousands of kerbs and almost ten years of running, today was the day when I took a tumble. Three miles into my run, I was on a riverside path...
2 Dec 2020 | Women's endurance running history, Women's ultrarunning history |
“The organisers dubbed this race “Hell in Paradise”. I am sure that when they coined this phrase they never anticipated how right they would be.” This seven-day stage race lived up to its nickname in more ways than one. Eleven of the 27 starters didn’t make it to the...
18 Oct 2020 | Running and the menopause |
Earlier this year I interviewed ultrarunning adventurer Nikki Love about how the perimenopause has affected her running. Since 2016, Nikki has been undertaking ultra distance adventures, starting with the JungleUltra, a 5-day race through the Amazon jungle in Peru. In...
