A muscle in our feet long believed to allow us to walk upright has been shown to actually play a major part in how we run.

Our ancestors’ ability to walk and run great distances helped spread our species across the globe, and now new findings from a team of researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Queensland has helped us better understand how our feet evolved.

Publishing its findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team looked at the concept that arches in our feet – which differentiate us from species such as chimpanzees – help us walk upright due to plantar intrinsic muscles (PIMs). However,...

Everything is new and exciting to me as a novice runner. I feel like I’m constantly running along a knife’s edge between the joy of accomplishing new feats and the drear of taking another week off due to injury. Sometimes, the benefits are completely unexpected, like seeing the sooty majesty of dawn over a train depot. Other times, the benefits are surprising despite being completely predictable, like what happened this morning.

Today was my second 5k run. I didn’t plan it that way, I just measured the loop I took and later translated miles into metric and found that it was a run of 5.6 kilometers. I was only looking for a convenient route through my neighborhood, yet I ended up with a good piece of work! Indeed, 3.5 miles is nothing to sneeze at. For advanced runners, 5k falls in the dry zone between sprints at the short end that...

This was posted on my blog www.thelongbrownpath.com

On November 22, 2018 I completed the Art Van Turkey Trot Chicago 5-mile race, coming in 3rd out of 70 in my age group and 119 out of 2180 overall. My son Philip finished #8 in his age group and my wife Sue, who ran the 5k, finished #6 in her age group.

Two small successes: a decent performance on my part, and seeing family members running too. Successes so small as to be practically meaningless. Each of our runs accounting for little more than 30 minutes of effort. Yet it occurs to me if a person could achieve small successes on a regular basis — a successful race, or contributing something small to a big project at work, or making some little observation that helped a friend or family member, or spending time on a community project — such...

There are arguments against running a Turkey Trot on t-day, not least being paying $30 to a company that organizes races all year round, so that I feel my money is going to them rather than the non-profit they are supposedly donating to. But they are, and here in Boulder, where I am visiting, it's to a non-religious organization that feeds the hungry without any proselytizing, and people are bringing cans of food to donate too, so that's ok. The actual organization of this particular race is a little disorganized: I've run Turkey Trots run by volunteers that are done better.

Not to mention that with a full free day, most 'serious' runners might rather run a longer distance on their own, with the streets mostly quiet and car-less, which I would have been tempted to do, if alone, but I'm not, I'm with friends and that counts for a lot....