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Last weekend me and my good friend Alex, aka @badgerbeats, took a trip to The National Running Show. We planned our day well, before heading over to the NEC in Birmingham, because there was plenty we wanted to see and we wanted to make sure we had good seats for each of the talks.
The highlight for me was the very inspirational Dean Karnazes, hosted by The Bad Boy Running Podcast, which I’m now hooked on. I’d read Dean’s book, 50/50, a few years ago, which chronicled his challenge of running a marathon every day, for 50 days, in each of the 50 states of America. Ridiculous! The guy is a legend in the ultra marathon world and looks amazing for his age, 60 at the time of writing. He says he has never been injured and puts his longevity down to only eating “what I can pick from a tree, pull from the ground, or catch with my own bare hands”. I liked that. He also doesn’t sit down, unless absolutely necessary. His office doesn’t have a chair and everything is set up to be used from a standing position. And he “micro exercises”. This basically means that he is constantly doing burpees, pushups, pull-ups and various other body weight exercises, in-between sending emails and writing a chapter in his next book. It’s no wonder he is still able to get up at 3am each day and run a marathon before breakfast. Bastard!
We also listened to a talk titled ‘Over 40 – start, maintain, improve!’ Hosted by the great Jo Pavey. Essentially this was information for runners in my age bracket on how we need to adapt our training, recovery, diet etc to compensate for the inevitable and annoying fact that our bodies are age-ing and don’t recover as quickly as they used to. Something that I am becoming more and more aware of now-a-days. One thing I really took away from this was I probably need to check my protein intake. I pretty much stopped eating meat four and a half years ago (I still have the very occasional steak or beef stew, roughly once a quarter) and I’ve always assumed my protein levels were okay, due to the fact I still eat fish and eggs. But I hadn’t taken into consideration the fact I am getting older. Booo!
We also got to see Ewan Thomas, Susie Chan and my hero as a teenage middle distance runner, Steve Cram. All in all a good day was had and we also managed to sneak a couple of pints of beer in on the way home.
