marathon

"Paula Radcliffe, Britain's best hope for an Olympic gold medal, is on crutches just three months before the Games open in Beijing after developing a hip injury which has forced her to stop training. It is another blow for Radcliffe who was forced to miss the London marathon last month because of a toe injury and whose preparations for the Olympics are beginning to look increasingly compromised."
Full Guardian report here.

Shock news and comment on The Science of Sport here.

I've not been very disciplined since finishing my last 2007 race, which was the North Face Endurance Challenge in San Francisco. That was my first ultra, at a distance of 50k. I didn't bother with my usual semi-attention to calories over the holidays, and packed on a few pounds. Come January, my long runs involved stretches of walking, and were sporadically sprinkled in my "training schedule."
Weird. You wouldn't think I was trying to work up to 50 miles in April, as an attempt to qualify for the Western States 100, huh?

Is it just me, or is the whole (non-running) world becoming obsessed with the marathon?
I guess when you get thousands of people running marathons for charity, and slow runners being hailed as super-heroes for "bravely" getting round 26.2 miles at barely above walking pace, everything else pales into insignificance. I won't start ranting. Suffice it to say that at the moment I am pinned in a non-running, non-athlete environment - and it comes a a bit of a shock when you live in Boulder.

I'm not a huge fan of Runner's World, but I will buy any running magazine that has marathon superstar Paula Radcliffe on the cover. Well, I'm a Bit, and she's our best runner, male or female.

So the March RW cover story reveals that the 2:15 world record-holder Paula was "down to" 70 miles a week by month 7 of her pregnancy. Her earlier concession had been to slow from 5:30 to 6:30 per mile. And there's a picture of her in full stride, smile on her face, running that 42-minute 10k race in London's Hyde Park 14 weeks before giving birth.