Running Shorts

With the Olympics coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. A New Calendar of Competition This proposal to fix the sport is going to focus on track and field; specifically, the outdoor competition schedule. Or, rather, the lack thereof. The current calendar is...a mess, to put it mildly. Once every four years there is an incredibly important global championship -- the Olympics. In odd-numbered non-Olympic years, there is another global championship, albeit somewhat less meaningful. In even-numbered non-Oly...

With the Olympics coming up in three weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It wold be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. Shamateurism to Professionalism Athletics exists in a state of shamateurism . On the one hand, it is a professional sport, in that individuals athletes can make money from it (how much they actually make is appalling, but still...). On the other hand, athletics is governed by amateur rules that directly limit the ability of its professional athletes to make money. It's this weird, nebulous purgatory that definitely isn't amateur but isn't fully profes...

"You're really bad at being injured," my wife has been telling me on a semi-regularly basis this summer. It turns out that she -- as wives usually are -- is absolutely, 100% correct. I'm bad at being injured. But now, for the first significant time in my running career, I'm trying to be good at being injured. What the heck does that mean? But first, let me explain the title of the post... In dealing with runners for the better part of 15 years -- as a teammate, coach, running store clerk, and internet message board lurker -- a common refrain crops up across the spectrum: how can I avoid getting hurt? The short answer: you can't. Sorry. The long answer: running is a sport, and athletes who partake in sports get hurt; that's what you sign up for. If you are training right, then you're constantly pushing your boundaries; trying to train right up to the edge without going over. The paradox is that you never really know where that edge is until ...