Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

We have talked extensively about ways to improve on this show.  We have episodes devoted to training paces and ideal workouts for different distances.  If you search the internet, you can find lots of resources and opinions on this topic. Check out social media and you can find a slew of athletes announcing their latest workout or training plan.   That is not the point of this episode.  On this sh...

Last weekend was the Key West Half Marathon and a big weekend for both of us in terms of racing.  Heading into the race, both of us had lofty expectations that we were trying to keep rational. The goal was to go test ourselves and see what we could do, but it had been awhile since either of us had raced a half marathon which increased the size of the question mark over what was possible. On our pr...

It’s race week for the Real Life Runner household and with that comes this week’s episode on pre-race anxiety.  The episode gives us a chance to discuss the concept, talk about our own emotions heading into the upcoming race, and cover some methods of calming the nerves.  We start with a major point that everyone is going to have some feelings connected to an upcoming race.  It is simply natural t...

New year, new you!  It’s time to go all out on training.  You have signed up for a race and it’s approaching rapidly so you need to get your running cranked up.  Enthusiasm is great, but can lead to some major issues involving overtraining. In this episode let’s cover some signs of overtraining, how to avoid it, and how it may sneak up anyway. Overtraining can pop up whether you are a new or seaso...

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As we wrap up the end of the holiday season, and especially Christmas in this household, the idea of delayed gratification has been forefront in my mind.  We were able to watching our two little girls count down the days until they were done with school and then until Christmas morning. It seemed like every day our little one would announce “I can’t wait until Friday!”  After I asked why I realize...

Gratitude is an incredibly important quality to carry with you throughout the day.  It frames how you perceive everything around you and tilts the day in a much more positive direction.   In our busy lives, one of the things that is very easy to skip past is the feeling of thankfulness and gratitude.  Angie and I both like to start the day bringing to mind 1-3 specific things that we are thankful...

The holidays can be so busy, with h oliday parties,  Christmas concerts, g ift exchanges, and f amily and friend get togethers. Where does running and health fit in?   First, let’s think about the benefits of fitting in running Running and healthy eating during the holidays are ways for you to take care of yourself PHYSICALLY.  Running b uilds strength, h elps to control the balance between energy...

The best gifts are something that the recipient wants but does not want to buy for themselves.  The gift is removing the barrier of spending money on something they they could live without, but don’t want to.   Here are some of our favorites.  Find them all at this link . Running-specific gear:  Running vest- upgrade an older worn out version.  Our favorite is the Noxgear Tracer360 Super watch - c...

The treadmill.  I have heard it called many things.  The dreadmill. A winter refuge. A shelter from stifling heat or powerful thunderstorms.  A human hamster wheel. The long road to nowhere. Cardio.  Personally, I like to think of the treadmill as cheap therapist that I can occasionally visit on a long lunch break or while the team heads out for a distance run.   Whatever your relationship with th...

Life moves fast and sometimes we need to step back and enjoy the moment or expand our point of view and look at the big picture.  That is not the point of this episode.  That was last week. Sometimes we need to move fast.  We need to get in a speed workout to test our physical potential.  We need to get four lunches packed, get in a full day of work, shuttle the kids to four places at the same tim...

“Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”  This quote from the iconic Ferris Bueller drives home the importance of going slow.  There are plenty of life lessons contained in the episode and we start with a discussion of balance. Life is a constant balancing act between getting things done and enjoying what we are doing. We need to keep up at wo...

Do you have that friend who seems to run a race every single weekend?  In this episode, we look into the good and the bad of constant racing. With a background in high school racing, Kevin has so many races in his rear view mirror, he cannot count.  On the other hand, Angie came into running as an adult, and naturally has fewer races to reflect on. She does however have several lined up through th...

This episode focuses on striving for greatness.  To understand this episode, I think that it would be helpful to know where it came from.  We are coming up on the end of the cross country season and trying to put things in perspective for a group of kids with hopes of reaching the state meet.  The New York City marathon is also this weekend which gets me thinking about my friend Ryan Shay who pass...

Perspective changes everything we do and how we do it.  We naturally compare ourselves with others or with previous versions of ourselves.  We judge workouts and difficult trials before they start. We name things hard or comfortable.  We predetermine how stressful an event will be. Shaping the way we interpret every event in our lives, the perspective we bring to all situations is incredibly impor...

How can I be a better runner is a regular question for a coach, and we have spent many episodes discussing the mental and physical aspects of training.  In this episode, we take a very practical approach and cover some unwritten rules of running, what we call running etiquette.   First, we should point out that all of these answers are open for discussion.  These opinions were formed under two ver...

It’s time for a look behind the scenes of the Real Life Runners, and a chance to listen into a coaching call.  The conversation this week is between Kevin and Angie about her latest 5k race over the weekend. The results were a bit mixed as it was a personal best, but it also fell short of the goal time.   In this episode, we really look at the relationship of coach and athlete.  We cover how commu...

This episode dives into the world of the inspirational pep talk.  We takes a few tangents along the way, but really try to view the pep talk from the perspective of both the coach and the athlete.  We also cover why the speech that gets you pumped up and ready to run through a wall can be a good and bad thing depending on how and when it is applied. Coaches want to feel like they are helping the a...

This episode marks the one year anniversary of the podcast, and it has been amazing.  When we first started it was a little scary to think we would put this out to the world and people would actually want to listen.  Now, as we approach 27000 downloads around the world, we wanted to look back at some major lessons for life and running.   This past weekend we also took a family trip to Disney World...

The half marathon is said to be for those who are only half crazy.  Angie and I both tried our first half marathon to see what was possible at that distance, while knowing that we were not ready for a full 26.2.  In this episode we dive into the half marathon from several different angles. We cover: Why to run it in the first place How long you will need to train Key workouts to boost your prepara...

One of my least favorite questions to be asked is one that I also frequently get as a teacher, coach, and parent.   What do I need to do? Except it usually sounds more like:  Uunnggghhh, what do I do?!?!? Please don’t get me wrong, I love helping other people.  It’s at the core of our lives as a physical therapist, teacher, coaches, and, of course, parents.  Helping and serving others is the point...

How do I get faster?  The ultimate question for a coach and competitive runner.  While there really is no magic workout or super predictor, there are some best practices.     Different workouts are designed for different physical benefits, and those benefits have varying levels of importance at different race distances.  Longer races require the physical ability to hold up over a few hours of runn...

Are you a real runner?  Do you identify as a runner?  What are some of the benefits of finally accepting this identity, and what can be some of the downfalls of identifying this way? Over years of coaching I have watched many runners take on the identity of runner.  Some are quick to accept while others take years to accept and may secretly still think they are not actually a runner.  The issue is...

As technology improves, and the amount of information available on your wrist increases, are GPS watches helping or hurting your running?  As with most things in life, the answer is, of course, both. We require every athlete on our cross country team to get at least a stopwatch.  Other athletes we train often have gps watches. We both have gps watches. The ease of workouts improves when you strap...

With the start of a new school year, there has been a lot of talk about clean slates and fresh starts.   Today, we talk about that concept and take two different angles:  1. On one hand, we should look at everyday as a fresh start, a new chance to make choices that lead us closer to the person that we want to become, the goal we want to achieve or the milestone that we want to hit.  Why wait until...