Five Things Running: Issue #83

Unlike on Strava, you'll find links here you can actually click on!

Heya and welcome back to Five Things Running!

I’m really annoyed by Strava with their stupid AI update, just to get this out of the way right at the start of the newsletter. When the AI thingy tells me I had a great tempo run while I only ran in zone 2 and a bit in zone 1, then I doubt that there’s more to the new feature than some intern playing around with some AI features other companies did a year ago.

Anyhow, I did get some runs in last week, starting strong on Monday, doing another one on Tuesday and then I didn’t find time or motivation until Sunday, when I ran a long-run around the Hamburg Airport, which is exactly the half-marathon distance from my house and back.

Monday I went to Ratzeburg, met my former teacher and talked to him about the Adventslauf in Ratzeburg, which will take place on December 1 this year. He’s 87 years old now and is not running the race anymore, but he was a lot faster when he was my age than I am, which he casually mentioned quite a few times. After my talk with him, I did a nice jog around a smaller lake in Ratzeburg, called Küchensee (kitchen lake) and also went by the old cathedral, which was built under Heinrich dem Löwen (Henry the lion) in 1160.

Here are the Five Things Running for today!

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How ‘shoe doping’ changed marathon times forever – in ways we still don’t fully understand

“Critically, supershoes do not make people faster. They return energy better, which means athletes can run at the same speeds with reduced metabolic demands. Athletes are the ones running faster — a fussy but important distinction.” - I’m sure the 2 hours for a marathon will be broken soonish. Not by me, though.

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How to dress runners for success

Raziq Rauf

writes about LSD Long Slow Distance, a specialty running brands store in Los Angeles. I just love all those new brands popping up, from Bandit to District Vision to Fractel and many others. While old style running shops still focus on neon and performance, newer stores focus on style and fashion.

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Get Home Safe: What Search and Rescue Teams Wish Trail Runners Knew

I usually run where I have cell phone reception and where it is not totally remote, so most stuff in the article doesn’t really relate to me. I did one run in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado a few years ago with no cell phone service and felt a bit uneasy when I didn’t encounter anyone on my way up to the peak.

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Inside Athlos: Alexis Ohanian’s Women’s Track Startup

“The women-only track competition, which Ohanian described in a “lazy VC pitch” as the Penn Relays meets Lollapalooza, included six races—the 100 meter, 100 meter hurdles, 200 meter, 400 meter, 800 meter, and 1,500 meter—as well as a high-octane dose of star power. The event last Thursday night in New York City attracted a sell-out crowd of more than 5,000 fans and 36 of the fastest women in the world, including U.S. Olympians Gabby Thomas and Masai Russell, who both took home gold in Paris.“ - it’s awesome that people try new things to get more attention for women in running.

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Fitness app Strava has a new AI coach—and its whacky comments are going viral

Athlete Intelligene is a really bad product and it really frustrates me that I pay for the Strava App and they publish an update that is totally worthless. The AI hallucinates and gives me totally stupid AI remarks that are not helpful at all. In addition to this, Strava just killed all the links in the app and on the web, so I cannot share the link to this newsletter anymore. It seems that Strava is focused on some really crappy KPI that don’t make sense for people like me who use Strava on a daily basis for everything running related.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Five Things Running: Issue #82

Now, go running! And listen to the Borderlands Podcast, if you haven’t already!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️