Bobby in Glasgow

Last week I mentioned the seminar (or whatever it is called nowadays) in Glasgow about long distance running. Cliff came back after a couple of days saying that he wanted to go but had unfortunately missed the date but we were represented by Bobby Young. Bobby reckons that he was disappointed by the lack of info in training but he did learn some stuff from it. The East Africans are apparently so good because of their small body mass, their active childhood, the training that they do, altitude, their good diet for distance running and genetics. [We can't do a lot about altitude or genetics but we can probably do something about training and providing an active childhood]. They are in general 10% lighter than non Africans.

Meanwhile Tim Noakes has a thing about drinking too much in road races and marathons. [This certainly strikes a chord with runners of my generation who never drank anything in any track race ever and only had feeding stations at 7.5 miles, 10.5, 13, 14.5, etc in marathons. As for carrying a water bottle on a run, well we just never did that.] he thinks that drink companies are over emphasising the need for fluid intake during races. For instance he says, Gebreselassie drank sparingly durin his world marathon record run, lost 10% of his body weight during the run and regydrated afterwards. Thanks for the info Bobby!