SportsShoes Blog

If you’re reading this, you are probably a runner or an endurance athlete of some kind. If that is the case, you are not normal. Believe me, your friends think you are strange. Your family, your loved ones, your nearest and dearest, even those who have known you all your life will walk away shaking their heads when you announce your latest race or challenge. They may tolerate your behaviour but rest assured they don’t understand it. Despite the fact that 40,000 people ran the London marathon last week, taking part in an endurance sport means you are not normal. You are some kind of strange wired being, different from the rest of the world, or are you?

I used to feel strange, different in someway and not sure why. When I started work, my colleagues thought of me as a bit weird. I am sure some still do. They would ask me if I was going to the pub after work and look down their noses when I told them I was going running. I am sure there were times when I would have liked a drink with them, I just wanted to run more, and I think they viewed this behaviour as anti social. This feeling of being anti social or abnormal stayed with me for many years, I did not really seem to fit and couldn’t really understand why, until I read a book by Mike Stroud called “Survival of the Fittest”

Mike Stroud is a doctor of nutrition and accompanied Sir Rannulph Fiennes on many of his expeditions including trips to the Poles. To me this book is absolutely fascinating. I regularly lend it to running mates. It compares early man and his hunter, gatherer way of life with today’s static couch potato existence. It explains how we used to run after food for 3 days before catching it, and now how we drive to McDonalds. It describes many seemingly super human feats of endurance, and explains just what the human body was and is capable of doing. It answered many questions for me and did a massive amount for my confidence and self esteem. In today’s western world, we endurance athletes are not normal, but rest assured, we are natural, so in answer to those who will ask, why have you entered a one hundred mile race? My answer is “because it is the natural thing to do”