Natalie Wong is an athlete, nutritionist and the founder of beyond the road photography. Through photography, Nat has been capturing the spirit, and showcasing the best of Australia’s distance running events.

Follow Nat on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyond_theroad_/

Mick Chapman is an endurance athlete and registered public health nutritionist. He also has a background in Personal Training holding Cert III & IV in fitness. We had a fun and insightful conversation about nutrition and its role in athletic performance and life in general.

Check out more resources from Mick here: https://www.chappo-healthnutrition.com/about

In todays episode we were lucky to be joined by Nick Walker. Nick is an avid runner (runcrew) and coach (Mosman athletics). Nick is currently recovering from a serious knee injury that required surgery.

We caught up and discussed topics like:

Nicks battle with a serious knee injury - what that process was like, Luke’s recap of Gold Coast Half Marathon - How was this different to Canberra? Dom's experience with COVID, Nicks experience getting heat stroke in a race, What its like to coach a squad, Differences between track and trail running.

Thanks Nick for joining

Kieran is one of Australia’s best distance runners primarily focusing on the 5k and 10k distances. Kieren currently has personal bests of 13:50 in the 5000, 28:47 in the 10000. In this episode we learnt about Kieren’s crazy journey in running so far.

Within this journey Kieren has suffered some gruesome injuries where the painful recovery process has shaped him into the mentally and physically tough athlete that he is today. We gained insight into his training structure which included insane workouts, one of which being 3km reps with times as fast as 8:30. Kieren also loves a good long run with some 2:50s peppered in the km splits (sorry coach Benny Saint).

In addition to a deep dive into his training schedule, we got to understand some of the mental tools Kieren uses to stay focused and fight through setbacks. In conducting this interview, it became quite clear that running is not just a career or hobby for Kieren, its a part of who he is.

In this episode we review our recent race performances and experiences on the weekend of 04/06/2022. Dom recently ran a 6 hour ultra marathon on the track which added to his impressive resume. The performance marks Dom as the Australian under 30 record holder in the 6 hour event clocking a total of 85.6km. We also reviewed the Wollongong running festival 10km event with Smitty who ran 33:23.

In the second part of the episode, we reviewed a few chapters in Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure. The book looks at the role of the mind and body when it comes to running and endurance events.

We looked at themes in part 1 of the book which covered:

The human machine (Vo2max as a singular view of performance)

The central governor (How much does the mind regulate endurance?)

The conscious quitter (How much does mental fatigue affect physical performance?)

In this episode we are lucky to be joined by Sota Maehara. Sota is a talented runner who recently broke the 33 minute barrier in the 10km at the Sydney10. Sota has a very popular youtube channel where he creates exciting community based running videos. We discussed topics such as: what its like to have an international upbringing, Youtube growth, running discipline, working at pace athletic and much more.