Pre-london half marathon comes to Yeovil in March

The first Yeovil Half Marathon will take place on Sunday 27th March 2011. Starting and finishing at the Yeovil Town Football Club the course will take in the town centre, ninesprings country park and the village of Odcombe (below).

With the Bath Half Marathon sold out and other pre-London or Brighton options thin on the ground unless you want to travel to Wilmslow, Hastings or Fleet this should prove a popular fixture on the calendar and entries are already flooding in.

Placed 3 weeks before London this is the perfect weekend for a final hard workout before starting to taper. And if the marathon is a step to far for you in 2011 then a half could be a great target to aim for.

From a personal point of view I've run these roads thousands of times over the years and know them well. The layout will be sure to keep runners interested and there are some good spectating spots so bring some supporters along !

Online Entries HERE

Glutes and Quads - exercises and stretches

Here are a few exercises and stretches that I demonstrated to the folks at Yeovil Town Road Running Club at a recent track training evening they did.

Weak/tight glutes are the cause of countless problems for runners and some simple exercises and stretches can make a big difference in a short space of time.

A good place to start is with a simple diagnostic test. Stand on one leg and check that the knee is over the middle toe of the foot. Then do some knee bends and have a partner observe. If the knee is moving in when you bend this is sign of weak glutes and probably and over active TFL (the small muscle in the hip which has the IT Band as its tendon.



The 'clam' is a simple exercises to work the glutes and you can progress to exercises like 'wall press'.

Lie on you side with feet, knees and hips on top of each other. Put a hand on your backside to feel the muscle then squeeze gently o lift the top leg (keeping the feet together). Hold at the top and lower back down while keeping the muscle squeezed (often the most difficult part)


A great all round exercise is the lunge. Keep the upper body vertical, the front shin parallel to the ground and the rear thigh parallel to the ground. From standing lower yourself slowly and notice the glutes and quad muscles working hard to lower you. Only go as far as you can with control. Then push yourself back up using the samee muscles. Difficult !

Once the basic lunge is mastered you can move to a more dynamic lunge in a forward direction. Variations including a backward lunge and lunge with twist and explained and demonstrated very well by Jay Johnson on You tube.


Stretching tight quads can help take some of the stress of the front of the legs which can frequently contribute to patellar tendinitis and problems in the pelvis. Doing this stretch lying down is a big improvement on the standing up quad stretch that we often see performed. Why ? When standing your stability is not great (see weak glutes above !) and there is a tendency to tilt the pelvis which creates an illusion of stretching the quad.

Lie on the side with the bottom leg at 90 degrees to lock the pelvis. Grasp the top leg at the ankle and bring the foot towards the buttock until you feel the stretch.


To stretch the glutes lie on you back with the ankle of the leg to be stretched resting across the opposite knee. A gentle push against the knee will produce a stretch in the glute (right glute in the picture here). To deepen the stretch you can lift the left foot of the ground.

Friday Track Training in Yeovil

I've been quiet on the blog front for a couple of months now. Training this year has been pretty disjointed and there hasn't been a huge amount to write about on that front recently unless you like reading about psoas stretches and glute activation exercises !

That said i've managed to get the running back up to six days a week of running singles. The resulting 60-70miles feels ridiculously easy after years of higher mileage marathon training. My body is moving well enough to do some faster training again and I'm looking forward to some good cross country races in the New Year.

One thing I have been experimenting with is weight training. Its completely new for me so like anything new I had to start cautiously and quickly notice big improvements. I've got some things to write about now so this will be the topic for a future article...

Back to now and this evening (friday) I will be at the track in Yeovil helping out with Yeovil Town Road Running Club. When they started their friday night workouts there were but a handful of hardy souls and now you can see 40 plus runners stretching their legs in a couple of groups under the watchful eyes of Tim and the two Pete's. I'm looking forward to tonight and it comes hot on the heels of leading a couple of workshops on Road Running at the England Athletics conference at Lee Valley last weekend which was good fun.

UPDATED
Photos of the exercises and stretches last night to follow soon...

Gwent League Bridgend

A fantastic day for the teams from Wells City Harriers at sunday's Gwent League in Bridgend. On a glorious day in south wales the senior celebrated their Div 1 debut by tying for spot. Led home by the clubs most recent international, supervet Jon James in 7th place, the team scored consistently. Eliot Haimes returned from pneumonia to take 13th and I got round one place behind in 14th. While my run was hardly setting the turf alight at least I was able to move fairly freely and enjoyed being in a race again. Behind us captain Gilling produced a storming last hundred meters to hold off several runners in a bunch sprint.

Earlier in the day the U15 girls had packed 3 scorers in the first 10 to dominate their age group. And with English Schools Cross Country Champ to come back into the team they should put up a good showing at this weekends road relays.

Speaking of which, Sutton Park will come a bit too soon for me. While I survived Sunday I have been pretty stiff the last couple of days and I just need to be sensible. On Sunday I was able to run a solid tempo though I still can't fully stride out but that is coming and hopefully I will be ready for the XC relays in a months time.

Full Results

Marathon season kicks off in Berlin

This weekend the autumn marathon season gets properly underway with Berlin and Toronto Waterfront grabbing the early headlines before the focus shifts to a couple of potentially epic races in Chicago and New York.

After a summer of hobbling around in pain and not enjoying the little running I have been able to do at least I am starting to move well enough to run 3 or 4 times a week now. Commitment has been in short supply so this weekend I'm off to Berlin and who knows, the juices may be flowing again come sunday afternoon ! For once Haile won't be lining up as he is having a crack at New York and what should be more of a championship type race. I really hope this means that he is going to prepare seriously for London 2012. A marathon medal 16 years after his first 10,000m gold would be a fitting finale for the maestro - I will always remember the day I sneaked into the stadium in Addis during the pre-worlds training camp in 2001 and he came up to the stands to say hello and introduce himself. Class.

Anyway, one of the benefits of being away from proper training is more time to reflect on what has worrked or not worked in training and also time for things that I wouldn't normally do. Last saturday the Somerset Runing Network organised a runners fayre over at Taunton. Top of the bill was Dave Moorcroft and he gave a thoroughly engaging talk which its fair to say had the audience captivated. The two big takeouts for me were 1. be the best you can be (at whatever level yor talent allows) and 2. enjoy the journey because very few will get to win an Olympic medal or set a WR. Wise words indeed !

After lunch we had a cosy little group for my Faster Marathon workshop, lots of good questions and sharing of experiences between the participants and plenty of fun for me and the tub of marathon lard...

Shoe Review: Saucony Kinvara

The minimalist footwear revolution has been in full swing for several years now ever since the Nike Free appeared and made minimal mainstream. While some manufactures like Vibram have taken things to the extreme conclusion i.e. almost non-existent the first Saucony offering in this space is somewhere in between traditional and minimal.

The thinking here makes lots of sense. While its without doubt that our feet evolved to cover long distances unshod the reality is that most of us in the western world have been wearing footwear for most of our lives. The muscles in our feet and legs have become accustomed to this and simply throwing off our footwear and going minimal tends to result in many compensatory injuries.

The smart strategy is to move from full blown trainers to barefoot in a number of steps - if you pardon the pun. So some barefoot walking and exercises can be combined with a more minimal running shoe design. And this is where the Kinvara comes into its own.

The heel is lower than a conventional trainer without been super close to the ground, the forefoot too. The weight is reduced to a mere 218g, a number that many racers would be pleased to hit. And the shoe is softer and more flexible than a conventional trainer.

My first run was a bit strange, especially getting used to the softer ride but I quickly adapted and it started to feel more natural. I really noticed what was going on with my feet when I run, in a similar way that I do when wearing spikes for a grass session. I've now used them regularly for runs up to about an hour in length to give myself time to adjust to them. I reckon that to get the most out these type of shoes you should also do some specific foot and leg strengthening exercises to accelerate the rate at which your stability develops.

Time will tell how well these shoes wear so I will report back when they have several hundred miles on them.

British Athletics League debut

17 years ago I was on standby as cover for Simon Rayner over 5000m in the Hercules Wimbledon AC team and today I finally got to run a BAL race in anger (guesting in a premiership race a few back doesn't really count) for my home town team, Yeovil Olympiads AC.

We won promotion to the BAL in 2008 and won another promotion last year from National 4 to 3. There are some parallels here with the football team which won promotion from the conference after years as a non-league side before quickly getting a promotion into League 1. While the footie team enjoyed a day out at Wembley for the 2007 playoff final the most glamorous day we can look forward to is a windy day at Swansea. So while my BAL ambitions with HW went down with their 1993 relegation its been up and up with Yeovil.

Today was a bit of a leap into the dark. I haven't raced on the track since 2008, the last 18 months have been woeful with a succession of setbacks and this year I have only really raced a couple of times in long races. My rustiness really showed and the few couple of laps I was off the pace before working my way to the front of the bunch but by then Bournemouth's Steve Way had got away from us. Until 3k things felt good and I was getting into a good rythmn but then I made the mistake of inviting one of the pursuers to take the pace and we slowed dramatically.

Going back to the front of the group I found it impossible to pick up the pace and my legs started to feel heavy. The last 3 laps was a survival job, it was how I felt when I started running 5000m races years ago. There is definitely a knack to be able to hammer that last mile with your body screaming and at the moment I've forgotten what it is ! And then horror of horrors the group of guys who sat off the pace and took it easy capitalise on me doing all the work and came flying past in the last 2oom. Not much fun for sure. With 4 weeks until the next race i've got some time to put in some lactic work and get myself better prepared. I'm actually looking forward to it !