Thursday, 25 March 2010

An Evening with Steve Jones

On Wednesday I was at Scotstoun to hear Steve Jones talk about endurance running in general and marathon running in particular. He was vey good but very quiet and could hardly be heard at the back of the room. Fortunately Peter McGregor grabbed me and had me sit at the front with him so I heard almost everything. I'll return to what he said before I go on holiday on Saturday but I'll pick up on two kind of controversial things he said in the hope of getting a response! First off: he was asked about the state of British marathon running and what could we do about it. The reply was as expected that the figures and times sepak for themselves. He reckoned that one reason for the poor state of affairs was the number of fun runners and charity runners. You can't criticise charity runners for running slowly and their numbers are growing while those of quality are decreasing. That trend will have to be reversed. He went further and said that last year in the States something like $55,000,000 was raised in charity races and none of it went back into the sport. He thought that that was wrong - the money raised by runners for charity was earned specifically for the charity but surely some of the profits earned by the organisers should go back to the sport? Any comments? Not to me, on the blog!
The second thing was when he was asked why the British Women do so well in the marathon and road racing generally when the men are not producing the goods at all. His comment was that the Africans had appeared on the men's scene but not on the women's racing circuit in anything like the same numbers. The men's ranking lists are totally dominated by Africans and it has had a demoralising effect on the men. It used to be that if a guy was ten seconds ahead of you in a race you would have a go at changing that the next week but now the men don't do that. The scene might be changing in the States because there are several projects working that might see the Americans doing it. The women do better because they still have the carrot of Olympic medals and big race prizes.
These were a tiny part of a whole evening's presentation (I have eight pages of notes and these two took up half a page between them) but have a think about them! I'll be back with some of his comments on training and racing.

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