I was in my parents' local the other week having a pint with my mum when the barmaid came over. "You'll know" she said to me "I'm after one of those wristbands that tell you how active you are. Which one's the best?" I've only used one of these - the Nike Fuelband - and it [...]
In between eating hot cross buns and Easter eggs last weekend, I went with my sister, Emma, to her first parkrun. We ran together round the 5k course - the longest she'd ever run outside and her first race. We finished smiling with Emma putting in a sprint finish to hold off someone who was [...]
It's April. Which for a lot of people means TAPER TIME! I've done enough marathons now (11 at last count) to know that the couple of weeks before a marathon, when you're running less miles and eating lots of food isn't always as fun as it sounds - this is when the panic sets in. [...]
Confession: I haven't swum in six months. I’ve got a new book out about triathlon in which I talk about how brilliant swimming is and how glad I am that I leaned to do it finally. And yet I’ve been to the pool once since September. I had good intentions of going swimming. Since September [...]
My good friend Katie King takes on the Underround challenge, devised by coach Rory Coleman, which involves running a marathon while visiting 42 London Underground stations. She was kind enough to podcast it as she went. The result is pretty funny. Listen to podcast Download it | Listen online | Get it via iTunes [...]
A thick layer of pollution had been hovering over London for the past few days. So it was fitting that, as I boarded the Eurostar on Friday morning, I was heading to Paris to do a race that took its environmental responsibility very seriously. The EcoTrail 80k trail race starts way out of Paris and [...]
Despite looking forward to it for a while, I couldn't make the inaugural North London Half Marathon (illness and schedule clash), so I dispatched Phil instead. Here's how he got on. What young boy has not dreamt of running out onto the Wembley pitch, pulling out his mobile phone and taking a sweaty selfie of a gurning [...]
I've been eating these energy balls for a while and when I posted a picture on twitter last week declaring that I make the best energy balls around, I had a few requests for the recipe. 'Recipe' is a bit of an overstatement for the way you make these balls. You throw four or five things [...]
I can swim 1500 metres without much fuss. I didn't used to be able to do this. Not so long ago swimming 15 metres would have been a struggle. But now I can do that 100 times over. I'm trying to remind myself this. Thinking of it as half an hour splashing up and down the [...]
Last year I stood by the side of a road in Sale cheering for runners: friends I was there to hand drinks to, people I didn't know, some I recognised but hadn't met. I waved my sign, told them they looked awesome and shouted my head off for a good few hours as runners went past [...]