Imagine a marathon with seven starts, nine finishes and 1600 turns, run almost continuously for 48 hours on a course only 328ft long. Imagine a marathon at which whales, seals and penguins are the only spectators. Imagine a marathon run
Many runners are too tense. They’re tense before they run, while they run and after they run. But it’s not their muscles that are tense – it’s their heads. Rather than running in the present tense, they’re always running in the past or future.Men my
Some of life’s lessons I’ve only had to learn once. For example, don’t put your tongue on a frozen flagpole, no matter how funny your friends think it is. Some of life’s lessons took me a little longer: as in, don’t wait to start a 16-week project
our own histories. But eventually I think it’s possible to move beyond our past disasters and well-recorded weaknesses.For me, the real joy of running and racing is finding out what I’m capable of on any given day. I start every race with my actual
It isn’t always easy being a runner. It isn’t always easy being the Penguin. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to be both and to be true to either.One of the canons of the Penguin philosophy is that running – all running – is joyful in its own right
will be a PB.John The Penguin Bingham, RW columnist
wife Karen in the final 20 metres, so technically she was last. Yes, it’s true that she hadn’t actually started running yet, that she was wearing three-year-old training shoes, and that she was laughing so hard at the sight of me running that she could
no hint of what was to come.However, as I stood at the base of Buzzard Bait Hill, it occurred to me that no one had ever mentioned the distance to the top. Even when I asked, no one would say. All I heard was that once you started you really had no choice
It happens every time I lead a pacing group. There are always a few runners who just can’t stand to run in the pack. This year’s Flora London Marathon was no different. They were there – the lead clique. They were less than a metre ahead of the pack
’s OK because it’s the process of running that matters, not the destination. I can learn something from every run, even the difficult ones. What can I learn from this one?” Extract from No Need For Speed by John Bingham (Rodale International Limited, £8
