Good Morning! 🏃🏻♂️
I haven’t looked at my Strava in weeks, but I hope these days will be over soon. I was able to walk with less pain in the last few days and I’m hopeful that I can start running again this week.
We’ll see, but I sure miss running.
I kind of dread the moment I am getting out there again. It will be a long time until I reach the fitness level I like to have after not running for at least two months.
Well, I guess I’ll take it one step at a time, literally.
Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻♂️
Fast Women: More pro runners are having babies, but it’s not easy
Not long ago, many professional runners in the U.S. waited until the end of their careers to have children, if they had them at all. That has begun to change. In the past several years, an increasing number of high-level runners have announced pregnancies while still competing. Among the reasons for the shift? Stronger sponsor support, a better understanding of what training during pregnancy can look like, and a growing list of athletes showing what’s possible.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Raising young children is difficult to balance with any career. For professional runners, part of the challenge is that elite sport and pregnancy require the body to adapt in different, sometimes competing, ways. And every athlete’s path back to high-level running comes with its own set of obstacles.
I have so much admiration for mothers in the sport. I don’t know how they are getting this accomplished, but I am glad there are more and more female pro runners out there.
Is Trail Running Actually Growing? Here’s What the Data Says.
This tells two things simultaneously. First, the sport is already vastly larger than its race scene. Millions of people run trails weekly without ever crossing a finish line. Second, the race ecosystem has enormous room to grow. If even a small percentage of that non-racing majority eventually finds its way to a start line, the race participation numbers look very different.
Read together, the floor and the ceiling are both expansion signals. The sport is bigger than we measure it, and the race scene hasn’t come close to capturing it.
Trailrunning is a fantastic sport, so it is only natural that it is growing.
Ultrarunning Culture
Ultrarunning is a growing sport. It used to be a small group of oddballs who, for whatever reason, wanted to run far. Now it is a large group of oddballs who, for whatever reason, want to run far.
With the growth of ultrarunning has come significant changes. Training methods are more sophisticated. Media attention has increased, and there is more money in the sport. Events are bigger, except for the ones that remain the same size but now have lengthy waitlists. The variety of event distances, surfaces, and topography has increased, and there are more race opportunities than in the past. There are also more factions — dissenting groups with competing visions about what the sport is or might become.
It must be weird for runners who have been around in the sport for a while and then all the commercial stuff kicks in.
Experience: I won the world’s deepest underground marathon
On the day of the marathon, I was nervous but excited. I’m not claustrophobic, but it was unnerving to know we were so far underground. I tried not to think about the 1,300 metres of solid rock over my head.
The mine was operational and I could hear the hum of machinery through the walls. As we were escorted to the starting point, I was fascinated to see vending machines and brightly lit offices. It was an entire underground world.
The tunnel was five metres wide and stretched for over a mile. To make up the distance of a full marathon, we would run to the end and back 11 times.
Would you want to participate in a race like that?
We’re So Busy Making Running Cool, We Forgot Why We Love It
The through-line is that people are exhausted by optimization. Everything has been focus-grouped and content-strategized and given a brand identity, and at some point the rough edges start to look really good. At some point the thing that was just a thing (not a movement, not a platform, not an activation) starts to feel like what you actually miss.
Running used to be like that. Weird and lonely and slightly embarrassing in the best way, something you did because something in you needed to, not because it photographed well. I ran Ragnar back when it was chaotic and silly and you slept in a van and ate gas station food at two in the morning, and I loved it for exactly that scrappiness. Then it became a $2,000 entry fee with branded finish lines, so the Speed Project came along as a beautiful middle finger of a race, six people running LA to Vegas because why not. And then TSP did the exact same thing in about half the time. Even UTMB has a Hoka logo and a global points system. I still want to run it, and yes that makes me a hypocrite, but when I’m out on those trails in Chamonix one day I know I wont care.
Oh yes.
If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:
Now, go running!
— Nico
🏃🏻♂️
Appreciate the shout-out, as always! :)