of the field, start planning your fancy dress costume now. With prizes for fancy dress as well as the usual winner and age categories, this is one race where technical gear comes second to style. 4. Grizzly & Cub Run Where: Devon When: March, 2010

You've been training for months. You've spent more early mornings in running shoes than you have tucked up in bed; you've done short runs, long runs, quick ones and slow ones, all of them at paces ranging from 'race' to 'rather not actually, thanks

away with a medal, mug and technical long-sleeved T-shirt having refuelled on sandwiches and soup."You are rewarded for 9K of blood, sweat and tears with a fantastic (and extremely gratifying) vision of the finish line. Take it at your lesiure

running. In a study at Purdue University in the USA, runners who added three cycling sessions per week to their training schedule improved their 5K race times as much as runners who added three additional runs to their weekly regimen. So whether you

barbell. Oops.I became obsessed with what the human knee can and cannot do when one of mine shut down after a couple of days of modest runs over a nearby hill. The technical name for my injury was patellofemoral pain syndrome, otherwise known as PFPS

-fastening by one notch before setting off," suggests Messem. "This can also be a solution if you've recently started running (or increased your training) and have lost weight."   Like running shoes, a new sports bra will also need be worn in, so to avoid any

GETTY IMAGES You've followed your training schedule to the letter, successfully dodged injury and illness in the run-up to the big day and all of a sudden you're lining up at the start. Get your head

of the problems that can stop your training in its tracks can be controlled or even prevented, if you take action early. It helps to have some knowledge of the injuries common to each discipline, how and how easily they occur and the effect they can have

's a motivator, perhaps more so than anything else in running. A race gives you a reason to train, to eat correctly, to lose a few pounds, to get fit, to get fast. Best of all, if you can run (or run/walk) for 30 minutes, you can complete a 5K race

of real-life runners – from Runner’s World readers to Runner’s World staff, scientific researchers to elite athletes – and asked them point-blank: what training methods have worked best for you?Their answers were as varied and imaginative as runners