The Shakeout Podcast

A few months ago, Madelyn Eybergen joined this show as Canada's university cross-country champion. Today, she's back as a world champion, but not in running. Instead, she conquered one of the fastest-growing sports in endurance: hybrid racing. If there were ever a competition to crown the world’s most well rounded endurance athlete, Eybergen would be able to make a strong case. She's no stranger t...

For all of Canada’s incredible venues for trail racing, none captures the attention of the running world quite so much as the famed Quebec Mega Trail . For years, QMT has been the proving ground for the nation’s top ultra endurance athletes and one that has increasingly drawn the interest of some of the sport’s biggest names globally as a stop on the World Trail Majors circuit. Whether it’s the ra...

Nickademus de la Rosa is no stranger to mountaintops, of both the literal and metaphorical variety.  For much of the 2010s he was at the top of the ultrarunning world, rattling off podium appearances at some of the longest, toughest and most iconic events in the sport, and boasting a list of completions almost as long as the races themselves. Of all the highs, perhaps none was greater than his fin...

The 2026 Canadian track & field championships are underway from Ottawa and  The Shakeout Podcast  team brings you all the storylines you need to know heading into a full weekend of action on the track. Host  John Gay  is joined by  Canadian Running's  Cameron Ormond  and special guest  Avery Pearson , fresh off her final collegiate season at  The University of Colorado. From a jam packed night of...

A quick scan of a pre-race warmup area and you’ll see a rainbow array of brightly coloured drink mixes filling the bottles, beakers, and hydration packs of endurance athletes. For many, these beverages are the bridge between the hydration needs of “normal” people and the performance necessities of athletes, with brands touting optimized mineral blends and special formulas aimed at keeping athletes...

Weeks after retiring from one of the greatest professional running careers in a generation, Evan Jager found himself inside a Swedish lab testing a supplement made from broccoli sprouts. The results of those lab tests caught his attention, and before the ink was dry on his retirement letter to the sport of distance running, the Olympic silver medallist and American record holder was right back in...

This week on the Shakeout Podcast host John Gay is joined by his coach Jonathan Green of Verde Track Club to breakdown the 2026 Ottawa Marathon, John's debut at the distance. 48 hours post race John and Jon review the training block leading up to Ottawa, the key workouts along the way, and the final preparation before the gun went off. From race-day strategy to tapering, recovery, and setting up t...

For his entire adult life, Olivier Duhaime has been no stranger to taking on hard challenges. Running his first marathon at just 18 years old proved a gateway into endurance sport that would see the Gatineau native tackle events from ironmans to ultramarathons and even a multi-day cross-province run from Quebec City to Ottawa. But when a shock cancer diagnosis in late 2021 put a pause to his endur...

It’s the middle of May and if you’re a marathon runner chances are that means one of two things for you:  either entering the final weeks, days, or maybe hours of your race taper or, on the other end of the spectrum, relearning the fundamentals of basic human function after your most recent date with 42.2km. With marathon season peaking we’re diving into a topic that’s often overlooked but critica...

Every sport has had its watershed moment when a new technology upends the landscape and redefines what’s possible. Baseball had torpedo bats, swimming the Lazer swimsuits, road cycling the introduction of aerodynamic carbon frames and in running we are living through an era defined by what were first, and best, described as “super shoes.”  For the last decade, the shoe industry has gone into overd...

For shoe designers, bringing a new model to market is always an uphill battle, but when that model is your first foray into the running shoe industry, it’s an even steeper mountain to climb. Fortunately for Scott Robertson , Innovation product manager at KEEN , reaching challenging summits is nothing new.  When KEEN decided that now was the time to make their presence felt in the trail running wor...

Perhaps it comes with the territory for someone with a degree in electrical engineering, but Kieran Lumb has never shied away from exploring the “Why” behind what he’s doing.  In the context of his current day job, running as fast as possible at distances from the 1500m to the 10k, Kieran’s curiosity has led him to explore virtually every training style under the sun, never afraid to embrace the u...

Ben Preisner may be the 3rd fastest Canadian of all time over the marathon distance, but when he toes the line on Marathon Monday in Boston he’ll be a rookie all over again.  Despite a 2:08 personal best, 3 World Championship appearances, and an Olympic Games under his belt, the 2026 Boston Marathon will be the 30 year old’s debut at a World Marathon Major.  What makes this year’s Boston debut eve...

When Christopher Morales Williams ran his personal best in the indoor 400m in 2024 he became the first–and only–man in history to dip under 44.5 seconds. Due to a faulty sensor in his starting blocks however, what should be the official world record was never ratified.  Two years later, and Morales Williams has finally gotten his shot at redemption, removing any doubt as to who the best indoor 400...

The pre-race carb-load is a right of passage in the sport of distance running, but in recent years runners’ obsession with carbohydrates has reached a level of fanaticism that puts other running trends to shame.  A growing canon of research is rewriting what we thought we knew about the body’s ability to process fuel during hard exercise, and with some recent studies going so far as to advocate fo...

With Spring around the corner, Canada Geese aren’t the only animals reappearing along the park paths and greenspaces of Canadian cities. They’re joined by another species emerging to embrace warmer weather and sunnier days ahead: the spring road racer.  Whether you’ve been counting down the days while slogging out the miles on the treadmill, or find yourself doing a double take at your calendar an...

If Rookie cards were a thing in the sport of Track & Field, then Foster Malleck ’s would be one you’d kill to get your hands on.  After a 6 year NCAA career at Boston University where it took right up until his final collegiate season to qualify for the national championships, the Kitchener Ontario native wasted no time making a splash in his first year as pro.  Less than a week after his final ra...

It’s been common wisdom in endurance sports that the further the race distance gets, the longer it takes to figure it out. But every rule needs an exception to prove it and on this count one needs look no further than the career of Molly Seidel .  After a gold-studded NCAA career at Notre Dame winning titles at 3000, 5000, 10000 and cross country, Seidel’s star only seemed to rise higher as the di...

It’s the first week of March and that means one things for Canadian track & field fans: the U Sports track & field championships have arrived. This week on The Shakeout Podcast we’re joined by Canadian Running  staff writer and U Sport insider Cameron Ormond , who joins the show to give us the rundown on the top storylines, podium picks, and athletes to watch heading into an action packed weekend....

The injury cycle can feel like a game of whack-a-mole, with one nagging pain going away only to be replaced by several different issues elsewhere. For the injured runner, the path to lasting health and getting back to the pain-free running begins with the right diagnosis. Yet while that may sound obvious the reality of getting there can often feel far from straightforward.  On this week's episode...

Like finishing a marathon, successfully completing a Rubik's Cube is something that even those who have never done it understand that it's challenging, unique and worth celebrating. And the few who have done it enjoy a special type of camaraderie. To most minds, the similarities between the cube and the marathon stop there. But for this week’s guest, Canadian Running's cover athlete,  George Schol...

So who’s really driving this machine? Today’s guest, Paul Gamble , PhD, has spent his career preparing elite and international athletes. But after years inside professional sport, he started asking an uncomfortable question: Are we developing better athletes—or just burning kids out earlier? In his book, Sport Parenting, Paul introduces the idea of the Sport Parent, a powerful, often invisible for...

The last time Cam Levins took the streets of Vancouver for the Vancouver First Half, he left with a new Canadian record at the half-marathon distance. Weeks later, he kept the record-breaking streak going with a career-defining run of 2:05:36 at the 2023 Tokyo Marathon, taking a minute and a half off of his personal best and breaking his own Canadian record in the process.  Fast forward three year...

Getting the worst flu of your life isn’t a perfect plan for anyone’s marathon race-week, but if there’s any athlete who's used to less-than-ideal prep it’s Hamilton’s Erin Mawhinney , a nurse educator who balances training upwards of 150km each week with the demands of full-time healthcare work.  At last month's  Marathon Project  in Arizona, Mawhinney's hopes of capitalizing on a flat, fast cours...

If there’s one word to describe the professional career of Lucia Stafford , it’s consistency. Since storming onto her first Olympic team in Tokyo at just 22, there has yet to be a global championship or major games where the Toronto native hasn’t been a part of Team Canada. For half a decade, she’s been a constant presence on national championship podiums, while also lowering Canadian records at b...