The Way of the Runner by Adharanand Finn
Author:Adharanand Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
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At the Bideford half-marathon it’s a windy day, but the course is mostly flat. My best time, run shortly after I returned from my six months’ training in Kenya, is 1 hour 23 minutes. I set my watch for 1:22 pace and head off.
Despite being hampered by a bad stitch, which forces me to stop twice, I run a big personal best of 1:19. A few weeks later, after some more prodding from Kelly, I run another half-marathon in 1:18. It’s difficult to be sure how much of this improvement is down to Kelly’s treatment, of course, but something is definitely working.
The key is not the specifics of the muscle activation technique, but the basic issue it is attempting to resolve: my malfunctioning body. Both Kelly and Saxby are making the same point, and giving me some techniques to address it, namely that if I want to run well, with good form, and to avoid injury, my body needs to start functioning as it was designed to. My whole body, not just my feet.
As well as his torture sessions, Kelly has me doing core workout sessions using kettle bells and he gets me skipping. He is also a big fan of climbing trees as a way to improve function. ‘Form follows function,’ he keeps telling me, as I clamber around on the wall bars in his warehouse gym in Devon.
All of this is about returning our bodies to their natural state. As Saxby’s zoo humans, we’re compromised by our environment, which is set up to make life ever easier, but less active. Many modern cars have now replaced the handbrake with a little switch operated by one finger. Even that tiny effort of pulling up a brake lever has been ironed out. Where will it end?
In rural Kenya, of course, life is much more active. When Saxby talks of zoo humans, I can’t help recalling the words of Renato Canova, the coach in Kenya: ‘To win a big city marathon, you need to be a little wild.’ He meant you need to take risks, be wild at heart. But maybe, physically you need to be a little wild, too.
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