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Finish time 2h 56min 32sec Splits 10K – 41:39 20K – 41:11 30K – 41:32 40K – 42:31 I don’t know if I heard this somewhere else, or my brain became too philosophical during the marathon, but it ran in my mind continuously during the race. And it’s true. The faster you are, the more pain you will have to deal with, and your brain will try to convince you to slow down by all means possible. And in the end, performance is all about how you cope with all this. I started to train at the beginning of the summer and followed a self-designedRead More →

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Remember my rules of running better races and mistakes I no longer make? Well, I made two of those in beautiful Stockholm :). Finish time: 1h 21m 42sec Elevation First, it was the course elevation profile. For some reason, my early research on Strava about the Stockholm Half Marathon only revealed about 70m of elevation overall. I still don’t understand how can the same course ran at the same time can show such different elevation results? 70m was nothing, so I viewed this race as an easy one. No longer felt easy when I read the official race leaflets which revealed no less than 370mRead More →

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As a minimalist, I’m committed to only making purchases when I really need them and not when there are clearances, or the products look nice or when a new version is out for sale. But it hasn’t always been like this. A tale of two pairs Back in 2015, both myself and Andreea started to train with our buddies at the Marathon Store in Bishopsgate. They had a running club there sponsored by adidas. One of the nicest offerings was the fact that they were giving free running trainers to try during group runs. The trainers were top of line adidas Ultra Boost and IRead More →

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Two years ago I discovered that I could run a lot faster. But the kick was the fact that I spent the first months of 2015 not running but training to improve my fitness. Well, if you have to know, it was also to lose my belly fat and man boobs :). So I found myself being able to run a 10k in just under 50 minutes, whereas previously, I could squeeze a 7k in 40 minutes with the cost of a couple of day’s worth of leg pain. Like any runner who went up a level, you start reading about how to train. AndRead More →

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Every October, the running community follows a trend called “run every day”. Back in 2015 when I started to run again after a few months of intense weight loss and fitness activities, I ran for a mile every day of October. Last year, 2016, I found myself in a much better position, so I did a little experiment called “run 10k every day“. People asked me about going from 1 mile to 10k in just a year and “why not just 5k?”. Well, 5k is a relatively short distance for me. Even when running below the lactating threshold, the time I spend for that 5kRead More →

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Everybody makes mistakes. When it comes to running, I made quite a few during my first marathon, half marathons, parkruns, club league, or whatever races I did. But the most important achievement was learning from these mistakes, as I pointed out in my Great North Run and London North Half reviews. 1. Starting off too fast Probably the most common mistake is going too fast. For me, this is caused mostly by bad or no planning. If I don’t know what pace I’m going to run at, “too fast” loses its full meaning. You know you started too fast when you’re flooded with heat, muscleRead More →

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This is a guest post by Katrina Rice. Thanks, Katrina! Running is one of the best cardio workouts that can be practiced by everybody. But experiencing knee pain while and after running can be due to many different factors. The most common would be misalignment of your femur bone, knee cap stress due to excess weight, uneven platforms, using the wrong shoes, health problems like arthritis, gout, sprains or old injury, and many more. Pain at the front of the knee is the most common pain there is during and after running. It commonly affects teenagers, female and older athletes. In most cases, the painRead More →

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If you’re following me on Strava, you’ve probably noticed that I described my North London Half race with words that I almost never use :). The reason for that was that it was both a hard and an enjoyable race, all this goodness concentrated in a wee bit over 1 hour and 24 minutes, an unexpected outcome, so I had to share this state of mind with the world. The pace My greatest weakness so far in big races, especially longer ones, was starting off too fast. Not this time. I believe that keeping myself from going too fast during the first 5-10 minutes ofRead More →

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8 weeks ago I started a programme called “Scream if you want to run faster” organized by Julie from “Too fat to run”. It was a 5k improvement plan and I tested my time with the Grovelands Parkrun in North London. This particular parkrun is pretty hard, very hilly and it has 3 laps, with an incline of 46m. My Personal Best was 28:53 which I got one week after the London Marathon in 2016. That means that I’d been training at that moment for about 4 months. No wonder I got a PB! However, time passed, my training months were long gone so IRead More →

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None of the two of us were heavily involved in sports activities during school. However, I believe that if our PE teachers had more interest in the future of their young students, they might have motivated us to pursue an athletic career. The turning point for our lives was the moment when we quit smoking. We were already doing some other changes in our lives (saving money for example) and we understood that by doing nothing out of the ordinary, we will achieve nothing out of the ordinary. So we had to take control of our lives and fill the void left by the missingRead More →