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June, 2008 // Posts published in June, 2008
The greatest athlete in the world?
I’m not one of them; I will declare all my cards up front on this one. But this was the verdict delivered by the Wall Street Journal in their survey last week, based on the performance achievements and physiological characteristics of some of the world’s greatest athletes. You can read the news article here, but […]
Fastest man in the world?
It’s seems an age ago, but it has only been just over three weeks since . He was duly dubbed the “fastest man in the world”, a title that is given to the record holder over 100m. Or, in some cases, the world champion, as was the case last year when the record holder Asafa […]
Running injuries expanded
Yesterday, Jonathan did and specifically the common training error made by runners who tend to move from one injury to the next in their training! He raised the the guideline that a 10% increase in distance from one week to the next is probably about the limit of what most people can aim for before […]
How to prevent a running injury
In a we posted on the shear dearth of training some runners race on. Incredibly there are runners out there who do hardly any training at all, and still run Comrades year in and year out. To be certain, they are not breaking any records, but yet they still finish within the cut-off time and […]
Comrades 2008 Postmortem
We have two posts today. The first (this one) is just a recap of the race, and some of the physiology behind it. The second (which you can find below) is a little more “South African-centric”, and focuses on the very weak display of the SA runners, and some of the financial reasons why this […]
Comrades 2008 and SA athletics
I have no idea what the average salary is in Russia. I’m “reliably” informed by Wikipedia that it’s $640 per year. I don’t know much about the typical Russian’s financial position, other than what I read in the news and Time magazine, and I won’t claim to be an expert in Russian-South African relations. But […]
Comrades Marathon 2008 result
Leonid Shvetsov has broken the “Up” run record in winning the 2008 Comrades title in 5:24:47. The 39-year old Russian, who won last year’s “Down” run in a new record time, was again untouchable, breaking Kotov’s old record of 5:25:33 by 46 seconds. He is completely in a class of his own, and the rest […]
The “real” Comrades Marathon
Yesterday we did a post , an 87km haul from Durban in Pietermaritzburg. And while the elite men and women will garner most of the media attention and focus on race day, they represent only a very tiny, perhaps “insignificant” part of what the Comrades is really all about. So I thought that today, I’d […]
Comrades Marathon 2008
If it’s mid-June, then it must be Comrades! Our overseas readers may not be familiar with Comrades concept (and lifestyle, for many SA runners), so I thought it would be interesting to give a brief run-down of the race, and then look at some of the “behind the scenes” aspects of what goes into running […]