Phedippidations

This is our time. With the changing of the calendar year it’s common for us to take the time to look back on the previous solar orbit, or look forward to our future. This is a great exercise, to look forward without dwelling on the past: as we make our way through this adventure called life. But, it think it’s even more important to consider our present….the now that we are existing in…today, righ...

Today I’m going to read for you the final chapter of Dr. George Sheehans book “Running and Being – The Total Experience”. I’m doing this in hopes that you might buy and read his book, and as a way of presenting you with an alternate special holiday episode of Phedippidations…a gift you don’t have to unwrap. This chapter is very special to me, as I hope it will be for you. It was the conclusion to...

The friends who I ran the Mojo Loco with are listening to this right now, Chris and Chris, Eddie, Nik, Dan, Mat, Susan, Steve, Samantha, Norm, Adam and Maddy. They’re wondering to themselves: “How is Steve going to tell this story? How will be express the narrative? What imagery will he call upon? What great message will he send forth throughout the tubes of the Interwebs to tell the world about t...

The history of wine is the history of civilization. It’s a story that dates back to the earliest days of agriculture and encompasses the life and times of our ancestors who consumed wine for both pleasure and ceremony. When we raise a glass today, we are tasting more than just a fermented grape juice which technology has perfected into a form of liquid art; we are tasting the product of history; a...

Get to know the parts and materials that make up your running shoes, and you’ll be a better consumer of the one critical tool needed to reach your goals as a runner. Whether you’re looking to run your first marathon, set a PR or BQ or just want to run at your own pace for the joy of it…wearing the right running shoes will make the difference between surviving through the miles, or savoring every m...

Today’s episode, being my first Running Blogcast features the writing of Neil Bearse, a fellow runner I’ve never had the honor of meeting in person: but I feel like we’re old friends. Neil is the one who first introduced me to my all time favorite musical band: Black Lab…as well as others. Neil is the manager of web based marketing for Queens School of Business in Canada. He’s responsible for the...

You have the same ability to produce content in an artful way that will, no doubt, convince someone you care about to join us on the road as runners…and, if in the course of those public new media conversations, you convince one or two others to rise up of THE COUCH OF DOOM, then all the better! You and I have an opportunity, today: through the use of blogs and podcasts to write and speak the word...

The American statesman Ben Franklin once wrote “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. There may be something to that with respect to our running performance. We sleep, on average a full one third of our lives. So, as a middle aged, middle of the pack, slightly asthmatic 48 year old runner: I’ve already slept 16 years of my life away. It seems like an unfair trade o...

Today I will tell you about an amazing person who lived his life to the top. It’s an interesting life with high and low points, with obstacles which were overcome leading towards an eventual spiral into disaster…but in the end, redemption and glory. Abebe Bikila was the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics, winning the Mens Marathon in Rome which he completed barefoot! The headl...

How many of us have trained over many months for a race only to perform terribly in the event itself, or how many of us have crossed that finish line in say, oh…I don’t know…a minute and 31 seconds slower than we had hoped. It happens…a lot. But we know that the sun will rise in the morning, we’ll put the pain behind us, and go forward. Some days we win, some days we lose, some days we don’t even...

In the area of genetics and with respect to athletics, we are trying to understand what construction instructions are required to build the perfect runner. It would seem that certain attributes exist which we can use to measure the influence of our genetic blue prints to create faster humans…and that our ethnic origins might predict who of us will be able to run faster and farther. But the fact is...

They ran all over the world. They ran in warm places, cold places, rainy places, dry places. They ran alone and with friends; they ran fast and slow, in an organized race and in their back yards. They ran with the sound of each other in their ears and the spirit of each other in their hearts. The World Wide Festival of Races is a celebration, but this social networking movement does not end on rac...

In a Universe that is thirteen point seven billion years old, on a planet that has only existed for four and a half billion years; our species: homo sapiens sapien, has only been around for two hundred thousand years, in fact modern day homo sapiens with our language, culture, use of tools, barter between groups, art, game playing, music, and reliance on symbolic thought only began to arise 50,000...

PodCamp is all about podcasting, and using this medium to reach out to a community. Since you and I are runners, and since we all listen to podcasts, you and I are a part of this thing…and since I’m eager to encourage everyone listening to my podcast to start up their own podcast, I thought it would be useful to dedicate today’s episode to what I learned at PodCamp. PodCamp is first and foremost a...

The Stanford University study titled “Reduced Disability and Mortality among aging runners” was published in the August 11th, 2008 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. At the time that the study was conducted: the assumption was that vigorous exercise would cause older people more harm than good. The expectation was that running would lead to an excess in orthopedic injuries and lea...

While the first part of this episode is dedicated to the precautions a pregnant mother should take with regards to athletic endeavors, there are many benefits to running while pregnant including the prevention of excessive weight gain. Running while you’re pregnant can keep you mood off and help to prevent pregnancy induced hypertension. If you’re healthy, and you’re having a healthy pregnancy the...

From Saturday April 14th through the 18th, 2010 my Dad, son, nephew and I traveled up the West Branch of the Penobscot River and across the northern end of Chesuncook Lake in the Northern Maine Wilderness. Through our journey we gained a better appreciation of Henry David Thoreau’s adventure of 1853. While logging in the Northern Woods of Maine continues, the river that we paddled on remains mostl...

I am a disciple of Dr. George Sheehan, I’m not ashamed to tell you that, I’ve read and re-read everything the man has written…and I’ve come to know him in a comfortable, familiar way. A man of science and medicine; a man filled with great passion for this sport and a devoted Roman Catholic…Dr. Sheehan and I have a lot in common; but while I yearn to be a writer and use this podcast as a creative o...

As it is with most things in life, taken in moderation: Caffeine can be good for you and improve you’re your health and your performance on race day. But too much of a good thing can lead to disaster. In living our lives to the top we have to learn to savor, with small sips, those things which bring us pleasure and improve our health. Show Links: http://www.jsams.org/article/S1440-2440(07)00076-X/...

This is my annual music show; recorded (as always) while I’m on vacation. This time I’m on the Norwegian Cruise Ship Spirit traveling from Boston to Bermuda with my family as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of my parents wedding! In addition to listening to podcasts, I love to run to music! It helps me keep my cadence in check and fills my head with positive images as I get my miles in. The song...

Why Cook Well. We eat because we have to. Civilization is nothing more than a ten thousand year old human experiment to test the freakish theory that mankind could eat without being eaten. Four million years earlier, our australopithecine ancestors crawled down from some God-forsaken trees to run with sweaty persistence after the meaty goodness left for scavenger animals. This, they called a meal....

Podcasting is a media so perfectly suited for the running lifestyle. Just as we schedule our runs in advance, we can schedule what we listen to ON those runs, in advance. We can multi-task the time we spend out on the roads and by listening to a podcast, exercise our brains and feel a camaraderie with the podcast host or producer: especially hosts and producers who are fellow runners like the podc...

I had come to the town of Milton Massachusetts to run a 10K road race that I had run three times before, with a 48:18 finish in 2002, a 52:30 finish in 2003 and a 53:40 finish in 2004. Today I was hoping to finish in an hour and five minutes, although secretly a sub one hour would make me feel better. I've been injured, I've gained weight, and I've not felt as in shape as I have in the past: but t...

Today's episode is not about my love of this sport; it's about how to help others to fall in love with this sport. Running is an activity that fellow runners, like you and I, gather pleasure from. We look forward to these feelings of pleasure every day when we lace up our shoes. To the non-runner, or someone who finds any physical activity abhorrent, this love of running is an alien emotion. These...

The story behind the swoosh is much bigger than that of just Nike and its corporate policy of treating it's workers as slaves: it's a story that speaks to the working conditions of many of the products that you and I use every day, from iPhones to Droids, from large screen TV's to these new tablet computers Steve Jobs keeps whining about. What is the morally correct thing to do when we learn the t...