Kenya can be said as the Mecca of the running world. Kenya has come to be the home of world-class athletes such as Eliud Kipchoge, Wilson Kipsang, Abel Kirui, David Rudisha, Florence Kiplagat, Edna Kiplagat, amongst others.

Though most of us are recreational runners, we are pushing the limits in our own way, and the Kenyan runners set an aspirational north star for us. As a recreational runner, we have a lot of questions related to how Kenyan runners train.

In this episode, we discuss topics related to:

HUGO VAN DEN BROEK

Hugo van den Broek is a former elite marathon runner, with a personal best of 2h12. He has coached amateur and elite runners from all over the world. His athletes ran at the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Olympics and had World Best performances in 2009 and 2015. When coaching his athletes, Hugo uses a combination of experience (he has been in the world of running for more than 30 years) and his scientific knowledge thanks to his M.Sc. degree in Human Movement Sciences.

Hugo and his wife Hilda Kibet have been living and training in Iten, Kenya, since 2007. They both retired from professional running in 2015 and have 3 daughters. The couple has a guesthouse where they accommodate amateur and elite runners from all over the world, and organize running camps called ‘Kenya Camp’ for amateur runners who want to experience training in Kenya under professional guidance.

VIJAYARAGHAVAN VENUGOPAL

Vijay was our first guest for our very first episode on marathon training and now again. It’s been a pleasure to witness Vijay on and off the track focused on sports and nutrition. Vijay has recently visited Kenya and get to see how Kenyans train, and brings the perspective of a recreational runner.

Vijayaraghavan Venugopal is an avid sports enthusiast, he is the father of an aspiring mid-distance national junior athlete, and himself an 8-time sub-3-hour marathoner. Amongst the marathons include Boston, Berlin, Chicago and Paris. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the nutrition brand Fast&Up.

Marathon running is becoming more popular around the world as a way to stay fit. These numbers are growing y-on-y. Closer to home, this can be seen in Tata Mumbai Marathon’s recent edition. The maximum number of marathon participants is in the age group of 40 to 44 years, which is 24% of the total finishers. A whopping 64% of the total marathon finishers are masters’ runners (age 40 and above).

With fast twitch muscles declining, and bone density reducing, how do masters athletes maintain their mojo?

In this episode, we discuss the topics relevant to master runners.

Tarun is a Delhi-based Architect and an avid marathoner. Tarun has been a sportsperson all his life, participating in various sports such as Cricket, Judo, and Volleyball at school, college, and district levels. After years of sports, he discovered running at the age of 40 as his fitness mantra.

Tarun has been running for more than a decade now and has participated in 56 Half Marathons, 10 Full marathons, and 15 Trail/Ultra Runs. His PB for 10K is 44mins13secs. HM is 1hr 38mins & marathon is 3hrs 44 mins. He has paced for various events such as Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, Cairn Pink City Marathon, Super Sikh Run, and Millennium City Marathon. In the year 2016, he did a self-supported run of 7 half-marathon distances over 7 consecutive days in support of underprivileged athletes. He followed that up in subsequent years and reached out to over 5000 athletes. Tarun has been a mentor to various running events, he was also the Race Director for two editions for FOOTLOOSE and Run for Justice. Tarun also has been training and mentoring people into running for the last 4 years and runs an academy by the name of FitWithT.

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Supplements play a very important role in filling the gaps in runners’ nutrition to help with their running performance, recovery, cognitive development, and overall health & well-being.

Currently, the supplements marketed for runners can be overwhelming. Supplement companies use a variety of marketing tactics & this can make it difficult for runners to determine which supplements are truly beneficial. In this episode, we demystify the supplements for runners.

We have discussed various topics on Supplements including:

Guest Intro

Mihira Khopkar

Mihira has been a National Gold medalist in Swimming and has trialed for the Common Wealth Games 2010 in Synchronized Swimming. Mihira is the Lead Sports Nutritionist at Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital through which she has been working with Asian, Common Wealth, and Olympic athletes.

She has been working in the field of nutrition  for the last 5 years specifically in sports nutrition alone. Her work includes interacting with national coaches, periodizing nutrition meal plans, athlete consultation to setting up daily high-performance menus at various sporting academies, supplement recommendations to athletes and federations as well as conducting group sports nutrition education sessions.

Mihira is an avid writer on Health, Sports Nutrition & Lifestyle with various magazines, websites, and newspapers. She is actively involved in research concerning sports nutrition, obesity & metabolic syndrome and has presented papers at both National and International conferences along with being a speaker at various sports science conferences.

She is a visiting faculty for Sports Nutrition at Exercise Science Academy (ACSM Accredited), Nirmala Niketan College of Home Science and SVT College of Home Science and aims to educate & provide optimum nutritional guidance to individuals to improve and maintain maximum performance, prevent injuries, and maintain immunity throughout life.

Related Resources

Supplements for Endurance Runners

Faster Stronger Higher, A One Stop Nutrition Framework ; book by Mihira Khopkar

Related Podcast Episodes

Nutrition for Runners

How to Fuel for a Race

Running & Hormonal Health

Running & Heart Health

The body releases endorphins, a short-lasting, deeply euphoric state following intense exercise. Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphins, and Oxytocin, what is common in these names? Well, they are hormones that make us happy. Endocrinology is the science of Hormones. Now, why are hormones important for us as runners?

In this episode, we talk about:

Guest Intro - Brigadier (Dr) J. Muthukrishnan

Our guest for today is Brigadier (Dr) J. Muthukrishnan. Dr. J. Muthukrishnan is an Endocrinologist. Currently, he is the  Professor & Head Dept of Internal Medicine;  Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) Pune.

He started running long distances in Jan 2010 & since then has run 29 marathons and more than 60 half marathons. Dr. Muthukrishnan is Boston Marathon qualifier from  2017 through 2021, his PB is at 3h 17m (TMM 2019). He is actively involved in promoting running in the community, and amongst medical students & professionals.

Started the AFMC Marathon in Pune in 2017, he has special interest in sports endocrinology and believes that sports and healthy lifestyle is an approach to tackle the Obesity-Diabetes epidemic.

Over the years there has been much research on the correlation between running and heart health.  While it is common knowledge that Running as a cardio activity does improve heart health, there is a lot more to the effect of Running on Heart Health. In this episode, we talk about how running can affect heart health in various ways with Dr. Aashish Contractor, who is a runner himself and is a pioneer of cardiac rehabilitation and sports cardiology.

In this episode, we talk about:

Guest Intro

Dr. Aashish Contractor

Dr. Aashish Contractor is currently the Director of Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine at the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital, in Mumbai, India, and a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine. Prior to this, he was the head of the department of Preventive Cardiology and Rehabilitation at the Asian Heart Institute. He is widely recognized as the pioneer of cardiac rehabilitation and sports cardiology in India and has recently authored a book, ‘The Heart Truth’, on heart disease prevention.

Dr. Contractor was the Medical Director for the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon, from 2004 to 2014, as well as other international sporting events in India.  He is an avid sportsman, having run several marathons, and in April 2012, did a non-stop Mumbai - Pune – Mumbai cycle ride (329 km) with two friends and in the process raised 1.2 crore rupees for children with cancer.  In 2016, the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of India awarded Dr. Contractor as the ‘Outstanding Zoroastrian in Medicine.’

Related Resources

Related Podcasts

Of the 7800 Runners who finished the Mumbai marathon in 2020, only 41 runners have run under 3 hours. That is about 0.5% of all the finishers.  It is every amateur runner’s dream to reach the sub-3-hour mark in a marathon.  So what it takes to run a sub-3 hour marathon?

In this episode, we talk about how to strategize a sub-3-hour marathon.

Guest Intro

Dilip Kumar

Dilip is a tech entrepreneur and an avid endurance sports enthusiast. He finished his last two marathons in under 3 hours. The most recent being the Boston Marathon this April 2022 with a time of 2:59:22. He has a keen interest in performance science & technology which has been an anchor to his own training philosophy. And he uses the same approach to guide other amateur runners as a coach. You can find him on Strava or on his blog at www.dilipkumar.co. Dilip was also a guest for episode 7 in the last season, Mind training for working athletes.

Vikram BJ

Vikram has been an athlete all his life, he has run a sub-3-hour marathon on 5 different occasions, his Delhi Marathon in 2019 is at 2 hrs and 55mins, and his personal best. Vikram has recently run a sub-3-hour marathon in Berlin. Apart from running Vikram is a Speed Skating National champion (inline speed skating) 7 times. When he is not on the field he is an entrepreneur & distributor of a leading inline skating brand, Simmons Rana.

Related Resources

Science of Endurance Training  

Improve Balance for Beter Running

How to improve Running Stride

While the science of endurance training has progressed steadily over the decades, there has been significant progress in recent times. Eluid Kipchoge's sub-2-hour marathon effort is a major breakthrough.  However, the training advice on the internet and the science quoted t support it can be confusing, and even at times conflicting. In this episode, we tried to put together a structure for endurance training based on the latest science. Host Aditi speaks with Coach Ron George, where he talks about the evolution of endurance training and the latest science, and fuses it with his on-ground experience working with endurance athletes.

Here are some of the topics discussed in this episode

Guest Intro

Ron George (Ronnie) is an Indian endurance sports consultant and athlete based in Dubai.  He found his roots in middle-distance running and duathlon in his youth. He then converted that into a love for coaching adults in endurance sports which he has been pursuing for over 10 years.

Ronnie is a Lydiard Foundation Level 2 peer-reviewed and certified coach. He resides in Dubai where he coaches running and cycling at I Love Supersport Dubai. He also founded and operates the popular international running club House of Runners and the Indian multisport team Rightshift Performance.

Ronnie's specialties include scholarly studies in endurance training and adaptation mechanisms, cycling and running coaching, performance testing and monitoring, and 3D running mechanics analysis. He can be found on Twitter @RonGeorge_Dubai discussing the latest in sports science and on YouTube on his channel Endurance Performance Open Learning Show.

Useful Resources

How to fuel during the race 

Metabolic Fitness for Runners

The Art & Science of Pacing

Research shows optimal fueling improves our performance by 2 to 20% during the race.

Running a marathon can take anywhere from 2-6 hours based on a runner’s fitness level. The energy expenditure while running a marathon is between 2200 and 3200 kcal depending on runners' conditioning, body weight, running economy, and external conditions like weather, elevation, etc.

In this episode, we discuss the fueling strategy - before and during the race. Fueling for various distances, how to prepare your fueling strategy right from training to the race.

Subramani Venkatesh, aka Subbu. Subbu is 7x Ironman. Subbu has been coaching since 2015. While he predominately coaches Triathletes, coaching for running is a dominant part. He has coached at least 40 athletes so far. Subbu is a certified Ironman university coach.

When not coaching he works as a software architect. His running PBs are 5K: 18 mins, 10K: 36 mins, Half Marathon 1h:22m, and Marathon 3h:09m (in an Ironman event)

He can be reached on Instagram @subbu31mani

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The running shoe landscape has changed dramatically with tech innovation. In this episode, we try to navigate the landscape of running shoes, and how to choose the right running shoes.

The first is the perspective of runners, and where they are in their running journey. Whether a runner is a beginner, intermediate, experienced, or elite, how that needs to be factored in when choosing a shoe.  The second is the training perspective - use the shoes for daily training, speed training, easy/recovery runs, races of 5-10k, Half or Marathons, and beyond. The third perspective is the type of shoe - Low stack or High Stack, Low or High Drop, How much cushioning it has, how responsive it is, whether it has a carbon plate, etc.,

Guest Intro

Our guest for this episode is Sharath Adanur. Sharath is an Industrial Engineer working with a major steel manufacturer. A self-coached runner, Sharath’s personal best timing of 2:46 in a Marathon. A self-confessed shoe geek, his vast collection of shoes can shame any sports shoe showroom.

Useful Resources

Guide to Speed Training Shoes

All you need to know about Stability Shoes

Shoe Advisor

Running Shoe Reviews

Technology is aiding the ever-growing popularity of running as a sport. There are metrics helping us to track our pace, cadence, heart rate, lactate threshold, etc. These metrics give us a very intricate view of our running. Which in turn, helps in providing a holistic view of our running progress.

In this episode, we demystify the key running metrics, and how they can help us to become successful with our running goals.

We discuss the essential running metrics such as Pace, Cadence, Heart Rate, and more advanced ones like Ground Contact Time, Stride Length, Lactate Threshold, VO2Max, Running Power, Recovery Time and more.

The guest for this episode is Kartik Iyer.

Kartik Iyer is a hardware design and verification engineer by profession - and needless to say that technology drives him, be it at work or in fitness. He loves exploring his potential as a fitness enthusiast and the data that his watch and other wearables share become a vital part of the feedback in this process.

A passionate amateur endurance athlete and a strength training junkie. A conversationalist by nature Kartik loves debating and hosting shows. He hosts “Let’s talk running”, a monthly show on the GeeksOnFeet platform. A news addict, he loves staying on top of current affairs, especially in politics. Music is an essential part of his existence and he is a lazy Carnatic (vocal) music learner.

Kartik has run 15 marathons so far with a personal best of 3:17:30 at the New Delhi Marathon 2021. & ran his HM (1:31:00) personal best at the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon in 2019. More recently Kartik ran a 10km PB (41:44:00) at the Bengaluru Runners Jatre.

Kartik can be reached on Twitter @kartikiyer2007 and on Instagram @kartikiyer2007