"Should you be doing that at your age?" If you're an older endurance athlete you may well have been asked this question. As a recent article in the British Medical Journal pointed out, the prevailing attitude is that exercise is for young people while older people...
Spending a whole day at an Iyengar yoga workshop gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I was learning. Iyengar yoga Iyengar yoga focuses on precision and alignment in poses, and uses props, such as blocks, blankets and belts, to improve the understanding of the...
What motivates women runners over 50 to continue running? What impact has running had on their lives? What was it like to be a female endurance runner in the UK in the 1960s, 70s and 80s? How can we keep fit into old age? These are some of the questions that I hope to...
More and more women in England are running and it's not just young women who've caught the running bug. A year ago I looked at the Sport England Active People Survey for 2012/13 and concluded that there were nearly one million women running in the UK. The latest full...
Over the Christmas period I've acquired four books related to running - the first of them is "Running Past 50". Can we keep running and become "ageless athletes"? "Running Past 50" is by American Richard Benyo, editor of "Marathon & Beyond" magazine. It was...
How the counties of Leicestershire and Rutland have successfully helped hundreds of people to start running. England Athletics set up the Run England programme a few years ago to encourage more people of all ages and backgrounds to take up running. They also created...
One of the things that puts women (and probably some men) off joining a running club is the apprehension that they will get left behind and it's true that some traditional running clubs do not offer anything for beginner or slower runners. Since I've been going to my...
6.8 million women in England take part in sport regularly. How many of them are runners? I've worked out that just under 837,000 women are running in England - nearly 4% of all women aged 16 and over. If we apply the same percentage to the UK population figure for...