I love reading about sport and sports related stuff – getting immersed in other people’s adventures, understanding the science behind sport and nutrition, learning about new ways of doing things, ... Brett and I are beginning to build up a good collection of books and magazines as well as making use of the growing number of sources of information on the internet. Brett is also a huge fan of Twitter and follows an impressive collection of elite sportspeople – cyclists, ultrarunners, ironmen, etc.
The book I’ve just finished is Relentless Forward Progress by Bryon Powell. One of the things I really liked about the book was the fact that Bryon included loads of articles by other top ultrarunners. This made it a great collection of advice and experience. It’s a really practical book – something I’ll definitely keep dipping back into as we train for the Transalpine and whatever other adventures follow that. It’s also supported online on Bryon’s website – iRunFar. Brett already spends a lot of time on there and follows the site’s Twitter feed. I’m looking forward to going and exploring the site, especially in terms of looking for advice on training for multi-day races as there’s only a short section on that in the book.
Before that, I read Survival of the Fittest by Mike Stroud. This was much more detailed and so took a lot longer to read. But the amount of information in it made it well worth the effort. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of endurance racing – e.g. extreme heat or extreme cold. To give an example of how the body reacts to these different stresses, Mike describes a race that he's taken part in - some pretty hard core things which are quite inspiring and daunting at the same time. This story of the race is mixed in with explanations of the science behind the reactions of the human body. I find this really fascinating as I love understanding how my body reacts under stress and why. One of the key messages that Mike is trying to get across is that the human body is designed to deal with a lot more than we think. It's not designed to sit behind a desk all day or in front of the TV. And it's not designed to eat processed crap. This fits in really well with so many of the other messages that are breaking through in sports and nutrition literature - see also Born to Run (Chris MacDougall) and the Primal Blueprint (Mark Sissons).
When we're not reading books, we have a couple of magazines that we enjoy reading. The two we subscribe to are Trail Running and Triathlete Europe. The first has a big focus on getting out into the countryside, getting muddy, exploring and having fun - doing slightly more alternative stuff. What we like about Triathlete Europe is that it's quite detailed and doesn't just re-hash the same articles year after year like some other magazines. A lot of the articles are written by pro athletes or top coaches and they cover some really useful and interesting topics as well as give us an insight into their racing or training. It gives a lot of food for thought...
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