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 ultrarunning history |
An ultramarathon in a shopping mall In 1984, Peter Goodsell of the Road Runners Club1 hit upon the idea of staging a 24-hour race in a shopping centre. The Central Milton Keynes shopping centre, which had opened in 1979, was the longest shopping mall in the world. The...
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.” The 1994 Telecom Tasmania seven-day stage race lived up to its nickname in more ways than one. Eleven of the 27 starters...
18 Oct 2020 | Running and the menopause |
Earlier this year I interviewed ultrarunning adventurer Nikki Love about how the menopause 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...
28 Sep 2020 | Women's endurance running history, Women's ultrarunning history |
It isn’t too often that everything goes well and perhaps this is part of the attraction of the 24 hour race – the waiting for the perfect day and the perfect performance. Eleanor Adams The period from 1985 to 1990 saw top performances from Eleanor Adams...
9 Sep 2020 | Women's endurance running history, Women's marathon history |
Imagine a time when women did not run in road races. Imagine a time when women were told distance running would harm their health. Imagine a time when running in a marathon meant risking being jeered at or even assaulted. This time was in my lifetime. I was born in...
16 Aug 2020 | General running history |
Road races in the 1950s in the UK were very different from today’s races. Most races were over 10 miles and distances varied. The only standard distances were 20 miles and the marathon. Petrol rationing ended in 1950 but the number of vehicles on the road was...
