New Name, New Site

Please check out the new site:

http://terminalcity.weebly.com

I will continue to maintain this blog at the new site.

Best,

Al

Young Spartans

Classic Men of Iron

Ross Enamait over on his site keeps promoting a fascinating and rich resource full of examples from the Old School of hardmen:

http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/

Definitely worth a thorough exploration, whether you a male or female aspiring to  strength and hard-as-nails-ness.

Dan John on Motivation

Check out this link at t-nation to a provocative little piece on motivation by the iron sage.

A few key points:

Motivation, the main problem facing athletes, those aspiring to athleticism, etc. can be summed up in three stages: SHOULD; COULD; and MUST.

SHOULD is fairly useless although it is a step on the way.

COULD statements mean that intellectually at least one is starting to organize their head around actually getting down to the wrok needed.

MUST is where we need to end up in order to succeed, transform, get the job done.

Anyway, as usual Dan states it all with more humour and wit than me.

Oh yeah, and the best part is the motivational secret, which I will only say involves a can of Alpo.

sage advice from Dan Gable

“If it is important, do it every day. If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.”

on Stellingwerff

Okay, I guess there’s something in the air. The following link will take you to an interview with Canadian 1500m specialist Hillary Stellingwerff:

http://dailynews.runnersworld.com/2008/01/a-brief-chat–4.html

Either coverage of Canadian running is looking promising or else we can expect another drought!

on Reed

There is a rare article about Gary Reed on the IAAF website (rare because it’s about a Canadian!):

http://www.iaaf.org/OLY08/news/Kind=2/newsId=42854.html

And he’s from B.C. and lives in Victoria to boot!

On Osaduik

Christopher Kelsall has posted a new article on Nanaimo runner and Olympic marathon hopeful Steve Osaduik over at Flotrack:

http://www.flocasts.org/flotrack/articles.php?id=268

It includes much criticism of the Canadian standards for Olympic qualification, which seem destined to exclude promising Canadian runners from acquiring valuable experience at the foremost international competition.

Marathon Preparation

For a very technical but worthwhile presentation on marathon preparation by Renato Canova:

http://www.vivamarathon.dk/rCanovaMarathonTrainingMethods.html

I believe that this dates back to the 1980s. I am trying to order his book.

What I like more than anything about Canova is the humanistic spirit in which he engages his work and the internationalism which he shows in sharing his knowledge and experience with those in backwards countries such as the U.S. and Canada.

Alison Outram

“I ran in one Great Britain team which consisted of six runners and a reserve. Of these seven, I know that as many as five were suffering from some kind of eating disorder, including me.”

-Alison Outram, quoted in Peak Performance (Hawley and Burke).