Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2008

VANCOUVER - For Chip Wilson, founder of the Vancouver-based Lululemon fashions, raising money for charity is an uphill battle - one he hopes the rest of us will join him in fighting.

Wilson announced plans Tuesday to stage the first annual “Chip’s Not Dead Yet Memorial Mile,” an uphill one-mile dash along West 10th Avenue, from Alma to Blanca Street, on June 20.

Funds raised will go towards the BC Children’s Hospital.

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Friends and rescuers celebrate finish of race that heart attack interrupted

Joanne Hatherly(jhatherly@tc.canwest.com), Times Colonist

Last weekend, runner Ken Pungente finished a race that he started one year ago: a 12-kilometre event at Cedar, near Nanaimo. In the February 2007 event, Pungente’s heart stopped and, as one of his rescuers put it, he dropped dead.

“I don’t remember any of it, no pain, nothing,” says Pungente, 65. What happened next has been described as a miracle. Three members of a hospital Code Blue cardiac resuscitation team were running not far behind Pungente that day. They were on him within minutes of his collapse, alerted by a nurse, Melanie Cunningham, who found Pungente lying pulseless in a ditch.

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Written by Patrick White and published January 25th in the Globe and Mail

Forget the funny name. This runner’s club will cover 72 kilometres in sub-zero temperatures just for beer, haggis and the hell of it. Tales of hikers lost in Lynn Valley after nightfall saturate the logs of North Shore Search and Rescue. Every winter, without fail, a few veer off course and spend a winter night flirting with hypothermia on the cliff-strewn mountainsides that flank Vancouver to the north.

This time of year there’s an extra wrinkle: “Hazardous winter conditions,” warns the ranger’s stern voice on the park information line. “Expect snow and ice on all of our trails.”

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By Christopher Kelsall
Posted on Flotrack Thursday, Jan 24, 2008

I first met Diane Cummins at the track, what are the odds?

My son (then 9) and I were enjoying the Victoria International Track Classic at the University of Victoria, Centennial stadium, May 25th 2001. It was a cool, breezy evening and Diane had just handily run away from her competition in an 800m race, easing to a 2:04.

One of the best parts of Vic International is heading onto the track and meeting world class athletes immediatley after the competition ends.

When we got down onto the track, we caught up with Diane first. We found her to be, accommodating, engaging; effervescent. My son got her autograph, which he still has, on the two page program - within moments she was surrounded.

Running into Ms. Cummins around town a couple times a year since; she always remembers my son’s name, which him and I find highly amazing.

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An article from Active.com, written by Matt Russ

“Why do triathletes run funny?” is a question I was recently asked. The athlete was comparing the run form of elite marathoners to triathletes. The answer is simply: Because they swim.

It is fairly easy to identify an experienced swimmer from a postural standpoint. Swimmers tend to have tight neck, chest and anterior shoulder muscles that cause them to assume a hunched over posture. Their shoulders are usually slightly internally rotated (thumbs turned in towards the body) and their shoulders may be high (picture a shrug) due to tight trapezius muscles. Each sport produces specific muscular adaptions and swimming uses the pectorals, latisimus, and trapezius to a high degree. Imbalanced caused by over-strengthening these muscles can not only lead to “swimmer’s shoulder”, but it can also affect run form as well.

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Written for Flotrackr by Christopher Kelsall

Vancouver Island, a paradigm of rolling waves of coniferous, temperate rain forest, envelopes hundreds of miles of trails, sheltering runners beneath a canopy of thick moss and evergreen, perfect for running year round.

Catching up with Vancouver Island’s own Steve Osaduik, locally known as ‘Oz’ and more importantly as Canada’s second fastest marathon runner, regarding this Sunday’s (January 13th) race, the Pioneer 8km in rural Victoria BC. The Pioneer 8k is the first race in the Vancouver Island Race Series, directed by the local Prairie Inn Harriers Running Club www.pih.bc.ca. Oz has run as fast as 23:39 on the course, two years ago. He says he is aware of local expectations and looks forward to hitting a marathon qualification standard this spring.

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By JOSHUA ROBINSON and published in the New York Times

Lornah Kiplagat’s afternoon run is out of the question. Even though her training center in Iten, Kenya, is only a mile from her house, the short trip is more daunting than any race.

Daily life in her village 18 miles outside the city of Eldoret, which has been battered by bloody violence in the past week, is punctuated by the sound of gunfire. Every day brings more roadblocks of blazing tires soaked in gasoline. Vigilante groups, wielding knives and automatic weapons, are constantly on patrol.

“It’s very tough to go running,” said Toby Tanser, a member of the New York Road Runners board of directors who is training with Kiplagat, the half-marathon world record holder. “Because if one of the vigilantes catch you, they want to know what you’re doing just running when the country is at war. And the mobs are always trying to recruit anyone who is healthy.”

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Written by PATRICK WHITE and published January 4, 2008

YELLOWKNIFE — As any top athlete knows, the best training regimens incorporate an element of brutality. Swiss tennis ace Roger Federer prepares for big matches in the searing desert heat of Dubai. Sumo wrestlers wallop one another with baseball bats or bamboo swords to get fighting fit. Ex-NHL sharpshooter Pavel Bure was known for skating lap after lap trailing a parachute. And then there’s Lore-ann Krysko.

The 44-year-old government worker may not aspire to such lofty athletic heights, but that doesn’t mean her training is any less severe. Ms. Krysko is a marathoner living in Yellowknife, where the mere act of stepping outside in running tights this time of year is a test of will.

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By Chris Bush - Nanaimo News Bulletin - December 27, 2007

Nanaimo’s Steve Osaduik is Canada’s second-fastest marathoner, but he may not get to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

To get there he needs to shave minutes off his time and get funding from Sport Canada.

For funding from Sport Canada, the organization that sponsors Canada’s national athletes, he has to beat a time of two hours, 12 minutes, 38 seconds – nearly four minutes faster than his current best time – at a January marathon in Houston, Texas.

Setting such high standards is Sport Canada’s and the Canadian Olympic Committee’s way of ensuring they concentrate dollars on athletes with the best chances of winning medals.

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Written by Mark Sutcliffe nd published in The Ottawa Citizen, Sunday, December 23, 2007

A runner looks for inspiration wherever it’s available. Here’s where I found it in 2007.

Paula Radcliffe: The women’s world-record holder in the marathon, Radcliffe led the New York City Marathon for more than 41 kilometres, then was passed by Gete Wami with a few hundred metres to go, then surged past Wami with an incredible finishing kick to win by 23 seconds. That would have been impressive enough if she wasn’t handed a baby at the finish line that she had delivered just 10 months earlier. Radcliffe has only lost one marathon race in her life — at the 2004 Olympics. She doesn’t appear to be on the verge of repeating that disappointment in Beijing next summer.

Ray Zahab: In February, he finished a historic 111-day run across the Sahara Desert, running the equivalent of two marathons a day in sand and wind. A few months later, he ran three of Canada’s toughest coastal trails in 11 days. Zahab never stops moving, so you know he’s planning something new and equally impossible for 2008. Stay tuned.

Alberto Salazar: Just over a year ago, the legendary runner had completed the New York City Marathon as a pace runner for Lance Armstrong. Then in June, while coaching a team of elite runners in Oregon, he suffered a heart attack and had no pulse for 14 minutes. “Runners need to know that it can happen to anyone, even if you’re in great shape,” he told Runner’s World. “They need to check their blood pressure and cholesterol, and to know their family history.” Known for his intensity as an athlete and coach, Salazar also says he has a new perspective and some unfinished business to resolve with family and friends. “It makes you think: You know what? I’m going to take care of all this stuff now. I’m going to start crossing things off my list. I feel so lucky that this happened, because now I see things much more clearly.”

Anyone who finished the Chicago marathon: The conditions were terrible: 30C heat and a shortage of water. So anyone who completed this year’s Chicago Marathon, including dozens from Ottawa, earned more than their medal. They deserved an apology from race organizers.

Oscar Pistorius: Born in South Africa, Pistorius had both legs amputated below the knee before he was a year old. Now he can run 100 metres in under 11 seconds and wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics. International track officials are debating whether his prosthetic legs give him an unfair advantage and his chances of making it to Beijing are remote, especially after the findings last week of a German scientist asked to study his prosthetics. But the fact that his disability would be considered an unfair advantage says a lot about how far athletes with disabilities have raised the bar.

Tracey Clark, Jennifer North and Cindy Scott: In 2005, the three runners decided that rather than discard their old running shoes, they would put them to good use. They started a program called Sole Responsibility. Two years later, they’ve sent thousands of shoes to camps in Chad, making life easier for thousands of refugees from Darfur.

John Stanton: The founder of the Running Room spends more time travelling than your average pilot. He finds a way to show up at almost every major event across Canada, sometimes running as a pace bunny, sometimes announcing at the finish line for hours and hours. I’ll always remember the first time I heard him refer to a group of us crossing the finish line at the Ottawa Marathon as “athletes.” I’d never thought of myself that way before.

Amy Palmiero-Winters: After losing part of her leg in a car accident, Palmiero-Winters ran a personal best in the 2006 Chicago Marathon. This year, she became the first athlete with a disability to compete in the elite field at the New York City Triathlon. Now she wants to do a sub-three-hour marathon, run a 100-mile ultramarathon and earn a spot in the World Ironman Championships by meeting the able-bodied qualifying standard. “You can get in as an amputee,” she says. “I don’t want to. I want to get in on my own.”

By GINA KOLATA
Published: December 6, 2007 in the NY Times

BILL MORGAN, an emeritus professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin, likes to tell the story, which he swears is true, of an Ivy League pole vaulter who held the Division 1 record in the Eastern region.

His coaches and teammates, though, noticed that he could jump even higher. Every time he cleared the pole, he had about a foot to spare. But if they moved the bar up even an inch, the vaulter would hit it every time. One day, when the vaulter was not looking, his teammates raised the bar a good six inches. The man vaulted over it, again with a foot to spare.

When his teammates confessed, the pole vaulter could not believe it. But, Dr. Morgan added, “once he saw what he had done, he walked away from the jumping pit and never came back.”

After all, Dr. Morgan said, everyone would expect him to repeat that performance. And how could he?

The moral of the story? No matter how high you jump, how fast you run or swim, how powerfully you row, you can do better. But sometimes your mind gets in the way.

“All maximum performances are actually pseudo-maximum performances,” Dr. Morgan said. “You are always capable of doing more than you are doing.”

One of my running partners, Claire Brown, the executive director of Princeton in Latin America, a nonprofit group, calls it mind over mind-over-body.

She used that idea in June in the Black Bear triathlon in Lehighton, Pa., going all-out when she saw a competitor drawing close. She won her age group (30 to 34) for the half-Ironman distance, coming in fourth among the women.

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Written by Martin Cleary, published in The Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, December 08, 2007

Adventure racer Ray Zahab loves a challenge, and he has plenty of them lined up for 2008 and 2009. Not only does he have the creativity to manufacture wild ideas for athletic pursuits, but also he has the physical ability and mental toughness to get the job done. Over the next 15 months, Zahab, 38, plans to run his first Boston Marathon, tackle another cross-Canada ultramarathon project and then pursue his polar expedition, where he’ll run to the North Pole. In the past, Zahab has amazed people with his feats of endurance.

He joined two friends in November 2006 and spent 111 consecutive days running across the Sahara Desert, covering 7,500 kilometres. He has won ultramarathon adventure races in China, the Yukon, Egypt, Libya and the Amazon. This past summer, he completed the eight-day Canadian Challenge, where he ran across Baffin Island in 27 straight hours, conquered the East Coast Trail in Newfoundland in 40 hours and then ran the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island in 16 hours.

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A great article written By Gina Kolata for the New York Times.

When Helen Betancourt, an assistant coach at Princeton, was preparing for the World Championships in rowing in 1998, she suffered an overuse injury: stress fractures of her ribs. She competed anyway, but then had to take five months off. Like most athletes, she did her best to maintain her fitness, spending hours cycling. Finally, she returned to her sport.

“I lost half my strength,” she said. And rowing just felt weird. “It was like I had stepped off another planet.”

Yet a couple of months later, much faster than it takes to get that strong to begin with, Ms. Betancourt felt like her old self on the water. Four months of rowing and she was in top form. It shows, exercise physiologists say, that training is exquisitely specific: you can acquire and maintain cardiovascular fitness with many activities, but if you want to keep your ability to row, or run, or swim, you have to do that exact activity.

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by Matt Fitzgerald
For Active.com

Every marathon runner dreads “hitting the wall,” or being overwhelmed by fatigue before the finish line is within reach, forcing you to slow way down or even stop. Different things cause this in different runners and most runners assume they know what hitting the wall is.

Muscles run out of glycogen–their favorite fuel–and as a result, there is no longer enough energy available to hold pace. Or perhaps muscles produce too much lactic acid, which builds up to the point where the muscles stop working properly. Or maybe the runner becomes too dehydrated and fatigue results from heat accumulation in the muscles.

Whatever the specific cause, hitting the wall in a marathon–or any other run–is the result of some type of functional breakdown within the muscles that impairs their ability to function at the desired level. Right?

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By Neil L. Cook, BS, MS, Med

Marathons are the “ultimate” goal for many runners. But there’s a core group of runners that believe the marathon isn’t long enough; not enough of a challenge. They feel the need to go longer, sometimes A LOT LONGER! These are different runners, not your average 10 K weekend racer. And although they are fiercely competitive, the camaraderie of ultra-marathoners is legendary. The support for fellow runners during an ultra extends further than any other running event.

What Is An Ultra Marathon?
A marathon is 26 miles 385 yards long. An ultra-marathon is any event longer. Typically, 30 miles, 50 miles, and 100 miles. There are other distances, but those are the most popular. There are also timed events: 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, and even multi day-races. Some are run on roads, some on trails, and some (mainly timed events) on a track.

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A few tips from Anton Krupicka:

First, I honestly believe every single runner is an ongoing experiment of one. What has seemed to work for me, may not-in fact, probably won’t-work the same way for someone else.

Run more! Whenever people ask me for training advice, I feel somewhat frustrated because I like to think that running is fairly uncomplicated. In a generalized, simplified nutshell-especially in the world of ultrarunning-the more you run, the better you will become at running. It’s certainly not the sexy answer and isn’t always super-exciting, but sheer time and pure hard work can go a long ways.

Have fun! This is a necessary corollary to the first paragraph! If I’m not enjoying my running, then I’m not going to run. Therefore, most of my running I really, truly enjoy, i.e. long runs in beautiful locations.

Slow down! I come from a background of training and racing on a college cross-country and track team and the number one training fallacy that I can identify now (other than maybe not running enough, but slowing down is correlated to that) is that some people would try to run way too fast on supposed easy or recovery days and runs. If the pace doesn’t feel easy, then it’s not. By slowing down to 8 minute pace I can go running comfortably for 3 hours, and by saving the hard efforts for the occasional race and speed workout, I’ve been able to go to the next level. However, getting out there and grunting and hurting at least once a week is still needed for improvement in this sport.

Keep it simple! Training to run 100 miles is not hard: get out there and run. A lot. Whether you’re tired or not. And savor the opportunity to access the simplified, primitive existence that running through the woods offers. Don’t get caught up in all the stopwatches and split times and GPS devices and heart rate monitors and gel packets and Camelbaks-just throw on some shoes (or not!) and let running remain the unfettered activity that it has always been.

If there is one thing every runner dreads for its devastating potential to reduces winners to also rans and silver medals to bronze, it’s cramp. So everybody has their favourite cramp theory and their favoured remedy but lets consider some facts first.

• Cramp is more common in males than in females.
• Cramp is associated both with the duration and intensity of exercise - the further and the faster the more likely cramp is to occur.
• Onset of cramp is usually after 30km in a distance race, regardless of running speed.
• Cramp during exercise is almost always in the large muscles that span two joints - the hamstrings, quadriceps and calf (gastrocnemius) muscles.
• Cramps are often initiated by a change in speed, gradient or running surface. A classic example is cresting a hill and then accelerating downhill or running on to grass after hours on the tar.
• Some people are simply more cramp-prone than others.

The most widely held belief is that cramp is due to dehydration and the loss of minerals such as sodium, potassium and magnesium. These minerals play a critical role in muscle contraction, so any imbalance would affect muscle function. However, if a runner were to become sufficiently electrolyte depleted while running, it is unlikely that only one or two muscles would cramp – surely the electrolyte loss would affect all muscles equally ? As it is, the muscles most likely to cramp are the comparatively large calf, hamstring and thigh muscles.

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Originally posted on February 22, 2007 at EliteRunning.com

Interview conducted February 15, 2007 by Duncan Larkin

Scott Jurek, 33, is arguably one of the best ultramarathoners in the world. Raised in a home on a three-acre lot outside Duluth, Minnesota, Jurek took up running in junior high school as a natural extension of his innate desire to be outdoors. He ran track his sophomore year of high school in order to prepare for his passion at the time: Nordic skiing. At the age of 20, he was talked into running his first ultra, the Minnesota Voyager 50 Mile, where he placed second. After that, he was hooked on ultras. In 1999, at the age of 25, he was the youngest runner ever to win the Western States 100-Mile Endurance run—an event that he went on to win six more times consecutively. He set the course record of 15:36 there in 2004. Jurek’s other notable ultra victories include winning the grueling Badwater Ultramarathon twice (2005, 2006) and establishing a new course record of 24:36, winning the Leona Divide 50-Mile Run four times (2000-2002 and 2004), winning the Miwok 100k three times (2002-2004), and winning the Montrail Ultra Cup series twice (2002, 2003).

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A great article from Forbes Magazine. Written by Rebecca Ruiz.

Jerry Armstrong’s body began failing him at mile 75. The 30-year-old San Diego native felt tendinitis in both knees and severe ligament pain in both ankles, which caused his limbs to lock up. He struggled to imagine how he might finish the 100-mile ultra endurance race known as the Angeles Crest, which takes runners through the San Gabriel backcountry in southern California. The former tri-athlete had readied his body for the 21,000 feet of climbing by running 70 to 100 miles a week for a year, but this was his first 100-mile race.

“People told me to treat [the race] with respect,” Armstrong says. “I thought I was. I was humbled by the race.” With the help of a good friend who served as his pacer for the last 25 miles, Armstrong power-walked the final miles after dunking himself in a cold stream to decrease the inflammation of his tendons and ligaments. He finished 23 minutes before the race’s 33-hour time limit.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, hey, you barely finished,’ but for me it’s about the adventure, not the finishing time,” he says. “It’s about managing your body, solving problems and working under stress. It’s not about running as fast as you can.”

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Published Tuesday, November 13 in The Province, written by Jack Keating

Pushpa Chandra will soon lace up her running shoes to take part in the world’s highest marathon on Mount Everest. The Vancouver naturopathic doctor has run marathons for the past 20 years, including the prestigious Boston and New York races, but there’s been nothing to compare with her next effort. Chandra, 49, will run in temperatures averaging -20 C.

She’ll start close to the Everest Base Camp (5,184 metres) and finishes 42 kilometres later over rough mountain trails at the Sherpa town of Namache Bazaar (3,446 m).

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