Gloves for your foot

During last Rotterdam marathon I saw a more senior participant running on some kind of gloves instead of the regular running shoe. I realised that enables you to run kind of bare foot in city environment.

I just came across some information on the 'gloves' from the brand Vibram with the fitting name FiveFingers.
A video review:

Recovery: trust your gut feeling

How do you determine the duration of the recovery periods during an interval training? On your gut feeling according to recently published research findings published in Psychophysiology.

During the research three groups were asked to do a 5 times 1000 interval at 90% effort. Recovery was done by:

recover for teh same duration as the duration of the interval, the work to rest ration (WR)

recover untill the heartrate is below 130 BPM

recover on your feeling

Result: With the heartrate methode the later interval went slower. Based on feeling or the WR method there was no decline in the duration of the intervals. Howerver the recovery periods were shorter with the gut felling method.
I wonder how far the heartrate sank with the recovery periods but the this is not mentioned in the abstractof the report:(

What to do after retiring from prof marathon running?

What to do after you end our marathon carreer? Some end up being trainers, coaches, write books on running etc. In other words they stay in field of running.

Some however start something completely new like Naoko Takahashi, the 2000 olympic marathon winner frm Japan, who started a vegtable farm (see Reuters).

Running with earphone dangerous?

Some people like to run with an i-pod or other musicdevices. This newsreal feature shows that it is not al togehter save to run woth earphones blocking 'outside' noises as you might miss out the odd crashing plane now and then..... It would be funny if it wasn't real....

50 marathons in 50 days

It has been done before. Running a lot to raise a lot of money. This time it is Hugh Williams-Preece from the UK. He started last week in Portugal and will finish in 50 days in downtown London after 50 marathons.
His aim? Raising 30.000 Pound for Marie Curie Cancer Care.
Wanna know more?: click here for the site.
And here to donate your cash.

The Hague goes for a new WR

The Hagues half marathon, the CPCrun, will have a topfield aligned for the upcoming half marathon according to the dutch newspaper AD.

On my Dutch Blog I wrote on an change in the course that probably will make it a faster course. Now with the fast runner Patrick Makau on the starting grid it looks like we are heading for an attack on the resident World Record. Makaus PB is only 19 slower than the World Record Wanjiru ran 3 years ago in the Hague.
With 3 other runners with PBs under the hour and 5 with a time just above the hour this is a very fast field. According to the article another fast runner is to be expected. We wait!

Like Rotterdam as a marathon city (read my previos post) the Hague is one of the top places to see a half marathon.
Like for the marathon I made the same tables for the half marathon. First we notice that there far more cities are in the top 100 of all times for the half marathon than for the whole marathon. So I limite the overview to those with 3 or more entries in the top 100:

And again we come across Rotterdam!

Looking at the course record the Hague leads the list with its world record:
And the same for the top 10 times ever:
Rotterdam only comes in 7th place but to show taht you can do anything with number: I took the average of the 3 best times ever run in these cities:

And yes our own Rotterdam is back up on place 3 (c:

Running into college

What do you get when you make college entry troublesome and give extra credits to people good at sports? Cheating! Check out this report on BCC sport.

Students in China can earn extra credit on college entry exams with good sport results. In this case a time below 2:34 on the Marathon. During the Xiamen International marathon 30 people with times below this limit were disqualified either for

carrying two time-recording chips and thus recording not only their own time

using imposters

using transport on some parts of the course.

I think that might be the effect if you add anything else to sport than just plain competition or your own private battle with the distance and the clock.