English For The Long Run

Today's guest is Shay Eskew from Nashville, Tennessee (USA). His life is so unbelievable that if you would see a movie about it, you’d probably say NO WAY this would happen in real life. His life is stranger than fiction. At the age of 8 the trajectory of his life changed forever. Shay was accidentally set afire when playing with a girl from the neighborhood. As a result, 65% of his body is covere...

This time, together with Chema Martínez Pastor, I have the honour to chat with Veronique Bourbeau. Chema is a runner, running coach and co-host of the popular Spanish running podcast A tu ritmo. He told me about Veronique and her mind-blowing running adventures, so I decided to try and get her on the podcast. And she said yes! Veronique Bourbeau is a native of Quebec City, Canada, who (currently)...

Nicole Linke is a 38 year-old ultra runner, writer and kettlebell instructor who currently works and lives in Berlin (Germany). At this moment she is training for the Race Across Scotland, a 215-miler ultra marathon. Today she feels strong in body, mind and spirit. But that has not always been the case: in her teens and early twenties she experienced bullying both at school and at home: she was ma...

Today's guest is Kike Nieto. I met Kike virtually on the A Tu Ritmo podcast, a very popular Spanish running podcast. Kike usually contributes with great anecdotes from the running world. He shares remarkable stories of everyday runners and talks about the human being behind the legend in the case of professional athletes. Kike is a 45-year-old dedicated amateur runner who worked as a Spanish teach...

I'm a runner with a reading problem, or a reader with a running problem. Fact is that I can't imagine what my life would look like without a good amount of running or reading. So today's episode is more about reading than running. I have the pleasure to talk with another book lover and language enthusiast, Oriana Domínguez. She is the founder of the Book Club Chronicles, an online book club for in...

David Harvey is a 39-year-old ultra runner from the UK who has done around twenty 100 to 250 mile races and numerous shorter ultras and marathons. On April 2nd he finished first at the Tunnel Ultra, a 200 mile ultramarathon that takes place inside the Combe Down Tunnel (Bath, UK). Participants must complete the challenge in under 55 hours and are not allowed to listen to music, use headlamps or ha...

Today's guest is amazing Tjarda Struik from the Netherlands. Tjarda is skilled in many different areas, a so-called Jack of all trades. She is actively involved in local politics, runs her own company and is a motivational speaker. In addition to that, she has two young children and a passion for running, skiing, indoor cycling and Pilates. Due to a progressive eye disease, Tjarda is also almost b...

To me, polyglots are the ultra runners of language learning. They go the extra mile(s) and seem to be able to do the absolute impossible. Luca Sadurny is one of them. He is a passionate language learner able to communicate in 8 languages (English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Brazilian-Portuguese, German, Neapolitan and Italian). However, in school, he never thought that he was good at languages. Wi...

Adam Gorlitsky is a 36-year-old athlete who lives in Greenville, South Carolina (USA). At the age of 19, he was involved in a single person car accident which left him paralyzed from the belly button down with a spinal cord injury. His doctors believed he would never walk again. Fortunately, ten years later, he was given the opportunity to try out a ReWalk robotic exoskeleton – a groundbreaking de...

Enrique Criado Navamuel is a 41-year-old runner from Madrid who is currently the Consul General of Spain in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). He is also a lawyer, writer, Real Madrid fan and an amateur footballer himself. On top of that he has two young children who grow up in a multilingual environment (German, French, Bulgarian, Spanish and English). Enrique ran his first ever marathon last October i...

Megan Cassidy is back on the podcast! Megan is a 41 year-old runner, originally from Ohio (Cleveland), who currently lives in Orlando (Florida) and her favourite distance is the marathon. In December 2022 she set herself the goal of running a "50k Every Day" in order to break the Guinness World Record of ultra marathons in a row and raise money for two charities. She talks about this experience bu...

Bailey Quinn, a 29-year-old endurance athlete from Florida, finished the NYC Marathon in 9 hours and 19 minutes and was the happiest person on planet earth. She wore a rainbow tutu and ran for a charity called Team Kids and a video of Bailey doing the marathon went viral around the globe. For a couple of weeks she was the talk of the day on social media. I was intrigued by her grittiness and enthu...

Magdalena Sznigir is a 30-year-old Polish endurance sports fan (triathlon, mountaineering and ultra running). She lives both in Armenia and Sao Miguel (one of the Azores Islands) because this way she's close to her beloved Caucasus mountains and the ocean. She speaks a bunch of languages: Polish, English, Russian, French and Armenian and in 2023 she wants to get fluent in Portuguese as well. In Ju...

I "met" Ozkan Mehmet on Linkedin. He posted a photo with a pile of books I fell in love with. I saw titles like "Chi Running", "The Science of Running" and was intrigued by them. I also liked something he wrote: A marathon is not a challenge. It is the way. What we talk about: * Leaving Cyprus for Australia at the age of 19 * Some great races in Australia * At what age he started running * The sun...

Gina Little is a 77 year-young runner from Greenwich, London. A couple of weeks ago she became the oldest female runner to finish all six Abott World Marathon Majors and earned the six-star finisher medal. (FYI: the Abbott World Marathon Majors is a series of six of the largest and most renowned marathons in the world: Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York City.) Gina has run the Ber...

Today's guest is Lola Guindal, a multipassionate woman, a so-called "jack of all trades". She is a translator, interpreter and English language trainer, but also a fervent Real Madrid fan, a loving wife and a mom of three. BTW: she is the first guest on this podcast who is not a runner! She tried to get into running several times in the past but she just could not keep motivated. So running maybe...

Today I have the pleasure to chat with Michael Crawley. Michael is a social anthropologist from Scotland who spent 15 months living and training with Ethiopian athletes. He wrote an insightful book about it called "Out Of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2020). It has already been translated into Japanese, Taiwanese, Italian, Hungarian and is about...

Today I'm joined by Claus Henning-Schulke, better known as Bottle Claus. He is a 56 year old German amateur triathlete who became famous last Sunday, September the 25th, during the BMW Berlin Marathon. Claus took care of handing over Eliud Kipchoge's bottles at every aid station. I'm sure you have seen videos of him, handing over the bottles to the flying Kenyan, celebrating the moment and then ju...

Veronika Haas (Vroni) is a 36-year-old competitive ultra runner, who grew up in Fels am Wagram in Lower Austria. She holds two PhDs, one in Philosophy and one in Latin but, surprisingly, she made her student job, as an Aerobic and Fitness trainer, her main job. She got married in 2021 and she became a mom, but this did not stop her from running and only 3 months after the birth of her daughter she...

Mara Yamauchi (1973) is one of UK's fastest female marathon runners of all time, with a Personal Best of 2:23:12. She is also a two time Olympian. She was born in Oxford but lived in Kenya until she was eight years old. Mara joined the British Foreign Office in 1996, but she kept on running and won the English National Cross Country Championship in 1998. From 2003 to 2006 she started working part-...

Have you ever wondered where to go for a run in Rome? Or are you about to go there for a holiday or a work trip and want to get the miles in? If it's a YES, then do listen to today's episode! Today's guest is Italian Isabella Calidonna. She is a 41 year old tour guide based in Rome who offers unique experiences that combine tourism and history with one of her passions: running. Isabella has an PHD...

Today's guest is Adam David Broughton. Originally he is from Nottingham but now he's based in Madrid. Adam has been an English teacher since 2005, and he loves what he does. Adam doesn't teach people WHAT to learn in English, he teaches HOW to learn English. In 2019 Adam wrote a book called How to English. In this book he shows us how we can become independent learners in 31 days. I read his book...

Chris Finill is a 63 year-old runner from the UK. He’s actually quite a celebrity because he is one of the 7 men who have run all 41 London Marathons since its inception in 1981. Those seven men are members of the Ever Present club and are now between 63 and 88 years old. Chris also holds the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive editions of the same marathon completed in less than 3 hour...

Gabi Hayes is a producer and filmmaker who grew up in former East Germany. Running gave her a sense of freedom living behind the Iron Curtain. She met her American husband hitch-hiking after a bus broke down in East Germany, and they dated behind the Iron Curtain for 4 years. After the Wall fell in 1989, she and Mark moved to the US and settled in Los Angeles. She couldn’t understand why there wer...

Megan Cassidy is a 41 year old runner from Cleveland (Ohio), and she didn’t start running until she was 28 years old. She has been running for 11 years now and her favourite distance is the marathon. She ran 41 marathons in 41 days in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record. She was nowhere near that record, but she learned a lot about herself, her mind and her body. Right now she is trainin...