Runners' World - Working Harder In The Room

Unreal Treadmill Sessions Push College Coach to Olympic Trials
Tyler Pence also trains with his distance runners, who inspire him to give his best effort.
Cindy Kuzma/Runners' World/Jan 14, 2020

Runners at the University of Illinois-Springfield abide by two rules: Be a good person, and work harder than anyone else in the room...
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Sports Illustrated: Perhaps Toby Tanser Got It Wrong

Olympic Marathon Silver Medalist Eunice Kirwa Busted for EPO Doping, Provisionally Suspended
Chris Chavez/Sports Illustrated May 21, 2019

Olympic silver medalist Eunice Kirwa of Bahrain has been provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit after testing positive for EPO, a blood-boosting drug. Kirwa finished second in the women's marathon in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro behind Kenya's Jemima Sumgong.

Sumgong is currently serving an eight-year suspension after she tested positive for EPO in 2017. She was initially banned for four years but appealed the suspension and then lied at her doping hearing. An independent arbiter determined she provided false records of a hospital visit to try and justify her failed drug test. Since the positive test came after the Olympics, she will hold onto her gold medal from the 2016 Summer Games but cannot compete again until 2027. She made history with her victory in Rio by becoming the first Kenyan woman to win the Olympic marathon.

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Runners' World - Better Run For Shade?

How to Handle Running in the Heat
Richard A. Lovett/Runners' World, Jul 26

However many bad-weather-will-make-you-tougher quotes we collect, there’s still one aspect of weather that most of us do our best to dodge: heat. In fact, many of us do everything we can to avoid it: running at dawn or in the late evening or even seeking shelter on treadmills in air-conditioned gyms. It is, however, possible to run in heat.

In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Portuguese distance star Maria Fernanda Moreira Ribeiro set an Olympic 10,000-meter record under hot, humid conditions (82 degrees with 60 percent relative humidity, according to historical data from Weather Underground). In the process, she posted a time of 31:01.63—one that 16 years later would still have put her in the top 10 in the much more temperate conditions of the London Olympics. The bottom line is that the human body is remarkably adaptable to heat. Its ability to adapt to high temperatures is faster and more dramatic than its ability to adjust to any other environmental stress that nature can throw at us, such as altitude or cold...

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Outside - Two-Hour Smart

Wisdom From the World's Best Marathoner
Martin Fritz Huber//Outside, Feb 9 2018

Eliud Kipchoge, the Olympic marathon champion, gave an address last November at the Oxford Union Society, a 200-year-old institution that touts itself as the “most famous debating society in the world.” Though there was no debating as such, attendees nonetheless got to hear two distinct perspectives on marathon running.

The first came from Kipchoge, winner of seven consecutive world-class marathons (and counting), who gave listeners some insight into his training philosophy in his characteristically understated style. The odds-on favorite to win the London Marathon in April spoke with quiet authority about the importance of consistency and discipline before ceding the lectern to David Bedford, the one-time world record holder in the 10,000 meters, who said he was certain that Kipchoge would retire as the “greatest distance runner the world had ever seen.”

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Outside: Go (Be) Pre

Running Needs Another Steve Prefontaine
It's been more than four decades since his death, and distance running hasn't yet found anyone who can match his bravado
Martin Fritz Huber/Outside


May 30, 2017, marks 42 years since the death of Steve Prefontaine, the charismatic Oregonian sometimes referred to as the “James Dean of track and field.” Like his Hollywood counterpart, Pre died in a car crash at age 24—an early exit that probably did more to secure his legend than an Olympic triumph ever would have. The site of the accident, known as Pre’s Rock, has become a repository of distance-running dreams: Fans visit from all over the world and leave behind tribute items (personal notes, track spikes, medals) for the man who once said, “I like to make something beautiful when I run. It’s more than just a race, it’s style.”


Prefontaine was never short on style...


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Outside: Life Lessons

Life Lessons from Running Legend Joan Benoit Samuelson
The Olympic marathon champ—who hopes to become the first woman over 60 to run a sub-3-hour marathon this fall—shares her hard-fought wisdom
Martin Fritz Huber May 24, 2017

Last week, women’s running pioneer Joan Benoit Samuelson celebrated her 60th birthday. A few days later, she ran the Sugarloaf Marathon in her home state of Maine in 3:12:21, winning her age group by a margin of more than seventy minutes. The 1984 Olympic marathon gold medalist now has her sights on the Chicago Marathon in October, where she hopes to become the first woman over 60 to run a sub-3-hour marathon. We wouldn’t bet against her...

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Outside: Democratizing Sport

Meet The People Making Running More Inclusive
The sport still has a long way to go, but these leaders are pushing for more diversity
Martin Fritz Huber/Outside, May 19 2017

In the lead-up to last summer’s Olympics in Rio, mega-event critic and Olympic historian Jules Boykoff had a suggestion for reducing the cost of future Games while bringing a greater number of countries into the five-ring fold. In a nutshell: more runners, fewer horses. “People from around the world can run and you don’t need tons of equipment like, say, dressage,” Boykoff said at the time. “So a real positive thing the Olympics can do is to try to bring in more sports that more people can play—in other words, democratize sports.”

It’s easy to see where he’s coming from. After all, running doesn’t pose the obvious economic or geographic barriers that make more extravagant forms of recreation—like skiing, golf, or, indeed, horseback riding—the purview of the privileged few. But even as recent years have seen record numbers of road race participants in the United States, work still needs to be done to broaden the reach of the sport—particularly by challenging market and media-driven ideas about what a typical runner looks like.

These individuals are on the front lines of that fight.

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Outside: When Athletes Dope

When Athletes Dope, Not All Sports Are Created Equal
Why it's more upsetting when endurance athletes fail drug tests than when NFL or MLB players do.Martin Fritz Huber/Outside Online, Apr 21, 2017

Last January, in the wake of a retroactive doping violation, Usain Bolt was stripped of one of the three gold medals he won at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Bolt himself wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing—it was Nesta Carter, his teammate in the 4x100-meter relay, whose reanalyzed blood samples from the games showed traces of the banned stimulant methylhexaneamine. As a consequence, the Jamaican relay team was disqualified—more than eight years after blowing away the competition in the Bird’s Nest stadium...

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