More often than not, these newsletters are inspired by my own training goals. Just over a month ago, Katie and I were lovingly coerced into entering the Great Eastern Run - the first opportunity for either of us to do some proper serious training for several years. We did a couple of sprint triathlons last year, but that was less about pushing the envelope, and more about not pulling a muscle.

My best time in a half marathon dates back to Wokingham 2008, en route to my second marathon - enough lifetimes ago for me to have no idea what to aim for this October. With three months to go, and no goal in mind, I thought it would be interesting to dunk my head into the water barrel of knowledge that is the Fetch database, and try to emerge with the golden apple of truth clenched firmly in my teeth - or at least without inhaling any of those tiny weird mentalist minibeasts that dart round any water barrel I've ever seen.

Back in the 18th June 2010 Newsletter I made a lovely graph showing a typical relationship between training mileage and race outcome. There's a reasonably sort of "oooh" link between race performances and training mileage - at least for us real-world folk. Here's the graph (don't worry, this isn't a clip show):

A typical 1hr40 half marathoner will run about 360 miles in the 16 weeks pre-race. That simple word 'typical' hides a lot of variability. There have been 420 performances in the bracket between 1:39:30 and 1:40:30 - and their mileage varies considerably. Ten percent of them run in excess of 534 miles, whilst at the other end of the scale, ten percent run less than 222 miles. Here's a graph:

As you can hopefully see, there's our typical runner in the middle, turning in 360 miles for his or her 1hr40. Using some paperclips, wool and a cat with an ASBO, I repeated this exercise for every time from 1hr20 down to 2hr20 - not because I think slower runners are useless, but because I've got at least 100 performances for each minute within this data range. The following graph shows the typical (median) mileage, but also the 25th (green line) and 75th percentiles (red line).

The question I've come to is this - if I'm prepared to invest 360 miles of training mileage, what should I do to make the most efficient use of that time, and get the best outcome? Run your finger left across the graph from the point where the yellow line crosses the 1hr40 line, and you'll see that 25% of runners can run a 1hr30 half marathon on a diet of just 350 miles. Over the next few newsletters I'd like to investigate some things we could all try doing to get the best race results from the least amount of training miles. I'll also be showing you how to get rock-hard abs in just three seconds, and a new recipe for toast that will make you literally invincible. But if you've got any serious suggestions, please send me feedback.

Site news - you may have noticed a new set of graphs on the Train page, showing your recent training in lots of interesting ways. You can configure this section to pick out the graphs you're interested in, and put them in any order you'd like. Look out for more graphs appearing in this section in the coming weeks, and further ways to poke this data around.

I'm also pleased to let you know that the Fetch Shop has its first ever sale - all shirts and vests are £20.12 until the end of July - that's a whopping £8.77 off the price of long sleeve stuff. Of course, just like any sale, we're trying to have a bit of a clear out, and we might not have many common sizes, but feel free to exploit it mercilessly if it suits you.

Happy Running,
Fetch

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With the princely sum of just four Weekly Newsletters under my belt so far this year, I present to you what critics are already referring to as 'the fifth one'. I enjoy writing them ever so much - I think I've got a bit of Angela Lansbury in me - but a combination of limited time, and not always feeling like I've got something worthy to say, have conspired against me.

Judging by some of the emails I get, not everyone is aware that there isn't a big team of people working on Fetch. I don't know whether it's blowing my own trumpet to say that I do pretty much everything you can see on the site (coding, design, writing, testing (ha!) - everything except the ads, although quite often I even get roped in to Photoshop them), or whether it's a humble admission that the site isn't as big or corporate as you might have imagined. So this week (or this month, depending on your confidence in the term 'Weekly Newsletter'), I thought I'd give you a little insight into the World of Fetch (and if you're interested in how it came about, try this one). Normal running stats will be back next time.

I am mostly in Bedford with my wife, sometimes in Nottinghamshire with my son - but nearly always working at home. It's usually very peaceful, although the dog needs to be let out every hour now due to what I will euphemistically refer to as his 'needs'. These days I try to confine myself to 9-5, but you'll often see me cropping up in the evenings, because quite honestly, I have trouble letting go, particularly when something's not working right - and there's always something in that category. I see the folks from Runner's World about once every six months, but I'm in weekly contact with a lady there called Andreia, who sells the ads that appear on the site. Other than that, it's just me really - which is great on one hand, because I can do what I like with the site, but also sometimes hard, because I'd like some important people to shout about it.

On yet another hand, it's pretty nice to see the site grow through word-of-mouth, rather than through the power of shiny corporate cash - I've started asking newly registered users where they heard about the site, and more than half come through word of mouth, links on club websites, and through seeing people wearing Fetch kit. So YOU are the important people - better than any advert - even if some of you are not suitable for viewing before the 9pm watershed, but nevertheless, you're out there, being Fetchies, and you're amazing.

The site travels light, even if rarely at the speed of it. Somewhere in the world there's a big shiny box with laser beams mounted on top that we lease from a company called Positive Internet - they've been our provider for five years now. I won't joke about this bit - they do a great job at keeping the server running, and the database safely backed up. I've never seen it or them - I just have a laptop (currently missing the left shift key), and the ability to smell Wifi. Fetch shirts, vests, buffs and Fetch-branded underwear (strictly limited supply, visit the Fetch shop after 11pm and use the password 'funhammock') all live in a cupboard at the top of the stairs, and get taken to the post office semi-regularly by my wife (or on occasion, a cash-strapped teenager).

So I sit here, and I fiddle with stuff, and I look at data, and I respond to your feedback messages (of which there are currently 740 in my inbox), and think about things that might keep you all entertained, or things that I'd like to understand about my own running, and then I try to code them, and fit it all together. It's a huge body of eight years of code, a bit like a map of the inside of my head. Some days I go scything through it like a drunken archaeologist, tearing down the old stuff, and rearranging the furniture until it all feels right again. And some days, none of it fits together, and all those years of layer upon layer of functionality are like a hoarder's front room, and I sit and click, and go round in circles, and try to remember exactly what it was I needed it for.

I don't know how to wrap up this newsletter, and that's a perfect mirror for the site really - there are at least a hundred things that need improving, and I never want it to be finished. Classic corporate marketing strategy would suggest I close with a 'Call To Action' that coerces you into doing my bidding, but I will stick with my original idea. With 6,999,950,000 potential Fetchies still out there, I have just one request. Fetch Everyone.

Happy Running,
Fetch

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This week I'm going to look at how racing is changing. I don't mean the general principle, of getting from point A to point B in as quick a flash as local by-laws permit. No, I'm referring to the types and quantity of races that we do. The Fetch Race Finder has been open for business for eight years now, and the good news is that overall, the number of races it holds is increasing at a fair old lick. There were just 2,904 races listed in 2005, but 2011 saw our best ever figure of 11,459 (or 8,219 excluding parkrun listings). Here's how the volume has grown, year by year. The pattern hasn't really changed, there's a peak in late spring, and another one in late autumn.

The two things I like most about racing are the chance to push myself, and then the chance to push lots of cake into my face, whilst meeting up with fellow runners. It's become a regular Saturday morning habit, and so it's no surprise to me that 28% of our race listings in 2011 were parkruns – because they offer both of those opportunities, and at a price you can't argue with. It did make me wonder whether other races have seen a drop in popularity because of this. I made this graph:

It shows the contribution that other races make to the annual racing calendar. The 10k drops like a freshly Immac'ed diver, from 27% in 2005 down to 18.4% in 2008, just as non-parkrun 5k races increase to their peak of 18.3%. Then the market for other 5k races reduces (perhaps as parkrun started to take off), and organisers move towards 10k again. Other winners include marathons and ultras, showing a steady rise over time. Losing out are 5 and 10 mile races, a cumulative 16.2% share in 2005 falling to 10.7% in 2011.

Onwards, and the next step I took was to look at the number of entrants to these races per year. Obviously the big caveat is that I only have the runners in the Fetch database to go on, but it makes for an interesting graph:

The red line shows the total number of people competing at all races, and the blue line shows the same figures but with parkrun removed. Overall, the number of competitors continues to rise, albeit at flatter rate since 2009, but the number who pay to do so has fallen slightly, despite an increase in the number of races available. With training volume recorded on Fetch rising by 14% in 2011 to its highest ever level, it can't be attributed to a shortage of runners. I looked at the number of participants by race distance, to investigate further:

10k and half marathon participation has fallen, and although marathon and ultra running are creeping upwards, the real winner here is the non-standard race distances - typically off-road and countryside races. Anecdotally, the cost of road closures, police presence and health and safety factors are pushing up the price of road racing, and with most of us feeling the pinch, it's no surprise so many of us are looking for cheaper options, whether it be parkruns, crowdsourced get togethers, or just wrapping up a big block of cheese in a spotty hanky and heading out in search of larks.

Happy Running,
Fetch

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It's ironic (and not in a 10,000 spoons kind of way) that there have been no newsletters for a month or two - because there's actually been too much news. I've been updating the Training Log, adding the ability for you to track all different kinds of Kit, settling things in with Fetchpoint, handling a whole bunch of fun in the Forum, and doing my best to tune the site up to deal with the increasing mileage that you folks are recording.

In the absence of the Fetch newsletter, other reputable running organisations have been maintaining a high standard. Just this week I've read that some kinds of pizza have less fat than others, and that when running, you must remember to breathe. If this is the kind of thing you're looking for, can I suggest that a thorough approach to maintaining equal use of both your legs will pay dividends, and that wearing clothing of some kind will avoid unnecessary trauma and delay. Send me your tips and I'll publish the best ones.

It's that time of year when a lot of people are hitting their training peak for spring marathons, including the longest marathon of them all in London (I'm officially retiring that joke as of now). One of the rules often bandied around says that the mileage of your five longest runs should add up to 100. I looked at nearly 5000 individual marathon performances, and found that this really is a rule for the faster end of the pace spectrum. If you're aiming for a five hour time, then knocking out five runs that add up to 86 would be more than respectable.

And now on to long run pace. At the risk of serving up pizza-slice advice, training is about teaching your body to cope with (1) speed, (2) distance, (3) recovery, and (4) pizza. The trick is to get the balance right. I would say that long run pace is more important for people who train on five or more days a week, because there's less time for recovery, and potential for your speed training to be less effective, but if you're training for a marathon on three sessions a week, it's just a challenge to complete the mileage. There are some lessons to pick up - here's a graph showing how marathon pace relates to the average pace of our five longest runs:

Each column in the graph represents a group of runners, and each group will in itself contain a diverse approach to long run pace - but the trend is clear. If you're a 2hr30 marathon runner, your five long runs will be about 54s/mile slower than your race pace - but if you're a 5hr30 runner, you may well do your long runs about 74s/mile faster than you run your race. Is this just because we struggle with the longer distance on race day, or is it more to do with our over-eagerness in long run training?

I looked at each runner's longest training run pre-race, and at the average pace of each five mile segment. The fastest runners start out slowly, and show consistency and even a slight increase in pace as the run continues. The slower runners gut the pig inside the first five miles, and spend the rest of the run gradually slowing down. For example, the 5hr runners start running about 11% faster than marathon pace, but by the time they reach the 16-20 mile segment, they've slowed down to just 3% quicker than marathon pace.

I've had runs like that, and they hurt a lot. So my challenge to you is to spend a bit of time thinking about what sort of experience you want at your marathon, and how to shape your long runs to help you achieve that. If you can work out which end of a pizza to inhale, I'm sure you'll manage.

A quick but heartfelt mention for our advertiser this week. My dog Arnie came from the Windsor branch of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home back in October 2001. He's about 15 years old now, and although he's not quite popped his clogs, he's kicked three of them off, and is making the most of his retirement. He's been a great friend for many years, and the work that all animal charities do is worthy of your attention.

And finally if you'd like to see two pieces of data cross-bred into the newsletter of your dreams, or if you have a suggestion or problem, please send me some feedback.

Happy Running,
Fetch

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I hope you're not suffering too much at the hands of the cold snap. I'm happy to be hairy on days like these, but although everything including the palms of my hands are nice'n'toasty, my fingers tend to go white and as stiff as a cat in a robot costume. My tip for winter: mittens are better than gloves for minimising heat loss, unless of course that's the name of your cat, in which case Smarties tubes painted silver make excellent futuristic legs*.

Blatant promo interlude time - please enter The Friends of Mick and Phil Half Marathon, on 11th March.

We're hoping to move house in a few months time, which will take us away from the luxury of Bedford parkrun just a quarter of a mile from our doorstep, and give us a tortuous 1.37 mile journey on a Saturday morning instead. Combined with the fact that our nearest shop is now a MacDonald's, you may discover that I'm the subject of a new Channel Five documentary: "The One Tonne Runner" by the end of the year.

All of which led me seamlessly to think about how far people are willing to travel for races. Parkruns are so ubiquitous these days that it's hard to imagine travelling far for a 5k, but people seem willing to justify travelling half way round the world for marathons. That's the feeling, but wouldn't it be nice to see that in graphical form, and in pretty colours? If you agree read on, otherwise please allow your mind to wander freely. Did you leave the gas on?

I looked at all the runners in 2011, and all the races they did, and the length of those races, and how far those runners travelled to get there, and how many times they swore at traffic lights on the way. It was completely exhausting, and I really must work out how to do that with a computer, rather than hiding in bushes. Anyway... here's the big graph:

Marathon runners crowfly a typical 71 miles to get to their races, but 10k runners go just over 13 miles on average, and for a 5k, it's 5.5 miles (down from 9 miles in 2007). Fetcheveryone is growing like Japanese knotweed - we have around 400 annual marathons listed in the Race Finder for 2011, compared with 220 back in 2007 - but there's been a decrease across the board in the distance travelled to get to races (the lines for 2008-2010 bear this out, but made the graph a bit messy). I'd like to think that it's because there are more races in general now, although I'm sure at least a few of you are attempting to save the planet, and more still are attempting to save money.

Site news - and it's been more "behind-the-scenes" stuff this week, working on improving page speed, and tinkering with a few usability improvements. Look out for some improvements to the training log in the next few weeks, Fetchpoint flowers, and maybe even a slightly more mobile-friendly version of the site.

A quick mention for The Outward Bound Trust who have charity London Marathon places available, because the nice lady who promotes them bribed us with some lovely Gore kit.

Finally, I'm pleased to tell you that Garmin have kindly offered to give away a Garmin Forerunner 110 every month to one lucky FetchPoint player. If you've never played before, it's a bit like a treasure hunt, but without the scurvy or the need to go "Arrrrrr". The area around your home gets sprinkled with coins, evil bugs, and other special markers to collect - it's a lot of fun, and will get you running in places you've never been before. Best of all, it's free - so register to play now.

Happy Running,
Fetch

*no, don't. It's a joke.

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. No winners this time on Takeshi's Castle... but maybe next time!

If it's not too late or too early to say it, Happy New Year everyone! I hope you've managed to steer clear of whichever harmful substances you're trying to eat less / drink less / inhale with a straw out of the navel of a consenting adult less, and that you've crammed yourself so full of friendly bacteria that they've evolved their own society in your small intestine and are currently developing a space programme, or failing that, something decent to replace Strictly.

Before I crack on with the newsletter, and whilst you're all still vaguely awake, please can I draw your attention to The Friends of Mick and Phil Half Marathon, on 11th March. It's a wonderfully well-organised race for an excellent cause, and I would love it if you could make it – so please enter now. It'll be full of Fetchies, and if there's no cake, I'll come to your house and make you some myself.

My dad turns into a pensioner today, and he regularly phones me up with details of his long runs, which put mine to shame. So I thought I'd look at how much mileage various age groups do. To help make the data more reliable, I looked at currently active runners who had logged mileage all year round.

The red hill on the graph shows the number of runners in each of the groups, and the blue line shows the typical (median) mileage by the runners in each group. For example, there were over a thousand fifty-somethings in my study, and their typical annual mileage was about 915 miles. Although there are fewer runners on the right-hand side of the big red hill, they are leading the field in mileage, which just goes to show that if you love running, it'll stay with you too.

It's also tempting to link the dip in the middle of the blue line above to some sort of mid-life crisis, but more realistically, it's because it's the biggest group, and therefore shows the greatest range of abilities. The fact that it's the biggest group is probably a bigger indicator of crisis – but hey, if you're midway through at 50, you're not doing too badly. Younger runners also collect more of their mileage (up to 20%) from their ten longest runs, whereas runners in their 50's and 60's only get 15% of their mileage from their ten longest. If my dad is anything to go by, the enjoyment of going out for a run is more important than pushing the envelope.

Taking a bit of a diversion, I thought I'd look at the typical number of days training to achieve a particular mileage target, irrespective of age. As you can hopefully see from the graph above, reaching a thousand miles for the year means an average commitment of about 156 days running per year. What you may not see straight away is that the line on the graph is starting to flatten as runners increase their mileage. As far as I can see, that points to the increasing importance of rest days in between all that hard effort.

Site news now - and as always, I'm tinkering away behind the scenes, a bit like the Duke boys under the bonnet of the General Lee – but without the moral guidance of Uncle Jessie or the uncomfortable internal conflict with regards to my cousin. Anyway... this week I've been updating the race listings so that they handle duplicates a bit smarter. Any two races with identical names, dates and distances will silently blend into one entity faster than you can say coalition government.

If you've been driven mad dragging the FetchPoint map from one place to another, there's now a little box where you can enter a placename or postcode to jump location. Speaking of FetchPoint, I'm hoping to announce a new sponsor for the next few months shortly – stay tuned for details!

Finally, if you'd like a brand new Fetch Buff, I'm happy to announce that they are now back in stock in the Fetch Shop.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. The views presented in this newsletter are not the sort of thing you'd see from a Torquay hotel bedroom window.

Picture me sitting next to a roaring fire (both bars on), in a high-backed winged arm chair, a glass of isotonic shandy in one hand, the other hand lazily stroking the dog in that place he likes (which is just behind his ears, or in fact anywhere except his nose). Bing Crosby is "ba-baba-bom"-ing gently and eternally from an out of sight gramophone (or possibly the cupboard under the stairs. That'll teach him to put a football through my window.)

Yes, it's the Christmas Special newsletter - a chance to review the year gone by, and to look ahead to the year-that-must-not-be-named for fear of breaching trademark agreements with the International Doodad Committee. And it's a bumper double edition -a cosmic fusion between the Radio Times (without the mandatory interview with David Jason) and any Beano annual pre-1985, before Dennis started smoking. There'll be graphs. There'll be site updates. There'll be me spouting inane non sense as usual. So go fetch yourself some industrial-grade sherry or engine coolant, and settle in. Let's Fetch Christmas!

Oh gosh, that's a bit of a build up - I think I may have put my back out. Let's start with some graphs, because we haven't had those for simply ages. As we're just a few days from the end of the year, it's time for the annual report.

You folks have done so much training that I can't measure it in hours any more - so this graph is in years. And between us all we've crammed just over 86 training years of activity into the last 12 months, up from 77 years in 2010. Running still has the sort majority (75% of all activity) you'd normally associate with state television and food shortages, but biking has bitten a bigger chunk, taking 13%, up from 10.7% last year.

I've occasionally seen people wondering whether running these days isn't as high quality as it used to be - a bit like GCSE results. So I looked at the average WAVA scores of every racer from 2008 onwards - and the results are remarkably consistent, but also increasing ever so slightly - we broke 60% as a group for the first year.

I took a look at the number of people in each performance group, and drew the lovely graph up above. Do we see a thinning out of faster runners? The answer is an emphatic no. The 90% WAVA runners are a mere scratch, but we're showing an increasing number of 80%, 70% and 60% runners, at the cost of 50% and 40% runners. So Fetchies are getting tougher and faster, and in fact we need to recruit more runners in the 40-50% WAVA bracket, and train them up.

I promised you some site updates too, and have managed to squeak one out, like a fart at midnight mass. A few people have asked recently about the possibility of hosting club championships on the site. In my experience, these usually take the form of a list of races that members should try to complete, with points awarded for each performance. So I've put together a simple prototype that will offer you this service.

It's pretty basic at the moment, so your feedback is very welcome. To give you a flavour of it, I've added some 2011 races for FERC. If you're interested in doing this for your club, but you need a bit of help, please let me know via feedback.

FetchPoint has been spreading like a weed - we have over 1500 registered players, and nearly a million coins, bugs, checkpoints, traffic lights, relays, presents, but only one Higgs Boson, which is just outside Peterborough as I write this. It's also not too late to collect five Garmin triangles (or Garmangles as they've now been nicknamed) for a chance to win a Garmin Forerunner 110.

Entries are trickling in for the Friends of Mick and Phil Half Marathon - so if you're looking for a heavenly half marathon in April, this is the one you should enter - there'll be more Fetchies than you can shake a stick at (particularly since the restraining order took effect). A huge thank you to everyone who has volunteered their time, or their goods and services to this eventapalooza.

And finally... I'm getting married next week to KatieB, my bestest friend in the whole world, and I'm so excited I might just pop - so you may find that my typical laser-like response times are lagging for a bit. The newsletter will return in full force on January 6th. Enjoy the holidays, eat just the right amount of chocolate, make sure the dog doesn't eat any, and let's hit the ground running in the year-formerly-known-as-2012. Gobi bless us, every one.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Well, just come back here, Mister. I'll give her a kiss that'll put hair back on your head!

"'Legend' is a word that gets used too often" is a phrase that gets used too often. But Mick and Phil Curry deserve every last bit of recursive cliché you can muster. Phil has cerebral palsy and sodium valproate syndrome, and his dad Mick has a fondness for Vaseline and the energy of ten bears. Here they are look: (thanks Hanneke for the photo)

I can only begin to imagine the challenges involved in looking after a severely disabled family member on a full-time basis, but if that's not enough, Mick has pushed Phil and his chair around 42 full marathons and a few hundred half marathons. They were awarded the Jane Tomlinson Inspiration Award by Runner's World in 2008, and have given heart to hundreds of runners along the way with their fighting spirit, and Mick's chant of "Easy, Easy, Easy".

A few years ago, a group of Fetchies organised The Friends of Mick'n'Phil Half Marathon, which raised over £5000 for the Curry family. The race made it into the Runner's World Top 10 races of 2008, which may or may not have been because the Fetchies all voted for it a dozen times each, but it was a genuinely well-put-together race, with some extremely attractive marshalls and organisers. And I'm sending you this newsletter because we're going to do it all again at Draycote Water, near Rugby. So please cancel any arrangements you've made for March 11th 2012, because you've now got something far more important to do. If that wasn't enough, Mick has offered to personally grease up all runners from his private stash of industrial-grade lubricants - so you'll be quicker than a Brylcreemed eel.

As promised in the last newsletter, I am sitting at the kitchen table in a jumpsuit, looking like Anneka Rice gone to seed, ready to take the pestering up a notch. Here's what we need:

Runners - without you, there'll be nothing. Enter the race online here. Runner's World have kindly waived their online entry costs for us. In fact there are no fat cats, big dogs, or corporate koalas taking a cut of the money. We will give everything we can to the Curry family, and if we raise more than they can accept (bear in mind we don't want to jeopardise any entitlements they already rely on), we will distribute the leftovers to other worthy causes.

Marshalls - it's probably going to rain, it may well be windy and cold, and some of the runners won't even have the courtesy to hug you as they run past - but you folks are essential to making sure that everyone has a good day. We need plenty of people, so if you can spare your time on the day of the race and can remain calm during the unlikely event of a chlorine leak, we'd love you forever. And that's a long long time. Join the Fetch group.

Race Numbers - we need 400 race numbers printed on the sort of paper that won't get soggy, tear, run or suddenly catch fire. We don't mind if you want to advertise your company on those numbers, and it will save a few quid off our bottom line. Let me know by reply.

Medals - we all like medals. I like medals. Have you got medals? Can we have them? We need 400 of them please - we don't mind if they advertise your pizza parlour or dog grooming business, but we'd like to hang chunks of metal on our runners, and that costs money, so if you can help, great - just hit reply.

Goody Bags - if you've got 400 of anything that you'd be happy to give away, whether it's a Freddo, a voucher for your shop, a banana with your logo toasted into the side, or a prize draw to win a pair of pants, we want to hear from you.

Donations - if you've got some money that you simply don't need any more, or if perhaps you like to ensure your bank balance is rounded down to a certain number of significant digits, we can help. Just let us know.

Timing Systems, Mile Markers, Signage, Race Photographs, You Know The Sort Of Stuff - if you can get hold of any of this sort of thing, it'll all help to ensure we have the largest amount possible to pass on. Thank you.

Publicity - we would like as many people as possible to know about this race. If it sells out quick, it makes our job much easier. Many of you will be members of running clubs, or work for companies involved with running, so it'd be great to get your help to spread the word about the race. Please use one the banners below to advertise it on your own websites - do what you can, and let me know - I'll give you a mention in the next newsletter.

468 x 60 banner (seen here in miniature, so it doesn't trash the layout):


300 x 250 (or 'MPU' as they call it in the big office):

If you can link these through to http://www.fetcheveryone.com/micknphil that'd be reet grand. Ta.

Right, that's me for another week or two. Thank you so much for reading... I'll do you some proper training analysis next time - you know, the way you like it.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Also available: a range of pasta shapes that look like your face.

I'm sitting on a train that's creeping out of St Pancras station, and wholly appreciating the fact that I normally work at home. For some reason, it seems that getting out of London on a Friday is something akin to a disaster movie. A bit like Snakes on a Plane, but with fewer snakes and one less plane.

I've been meeting with the Big People at RW, and telling them all about FetchPoint: The Game, which I'm delighted to say, I can now share with you (assuming I don't end up sleeping in a platform lift in Oxford Station. I did that once.).

So, as I've now finished my Panini (tuna and cheese, with some sort of onion bits, most of which didn't end up smeared over my face), let me tell you about FetchPoint. Of course, you can just click the link, and find out for yourself, but do bear with me, and I'll try to fill you in.

When you log your training runs on Fetch, you can specify the route that you ran – and if you've got a jazzy GPS watch, you can do it automatically. You might be the sort of person who always does the same route, or you might like to mix it up and wear a costume. In FetchPoint, your route matters (your costume, less so).

Register to play and the area around your base location will be randomly sprinkled with lots of lovely “markers” – which you can view by checking your map. As you might imagine, these markers do different things, but in essence, some of them are good, and some are bad. Here's a quick outline of the ones I've created so far:

• Money
  Collect these to earn credits and buy stuff.
• Relays
  These move in one of eight different compass directions.
• Bugs
  Bugs are bad, and need to be run away from your home.
• Random
  Pick up one of these, and anything can happen.
• Rent
  Run through one of these, and you'll have to pay rent to its owner.

For more information, check out the marker guide which should tell you everything you need.

Armed with this information and half a brain, all you've got to do is work out a route that will allow you to score the most points, and then get your daps on and go run it. Markers have an invisible 80 metre radius around them – so you just need to get reasonably close to them, there's no need to knock on peoples doors. And let me say this now, whilst you're all listening – if there's a marker in the middle of the motorway, or in the sea, or one that would involve you being arrested, squashed, falling from a great height screaming “I regret nothing”, or otherwise dangerous, then just click the “Report Marker” link, and it'll get removed from the map. Run safe kids.

Get home, upload your run, give it a few minutes to whirr and hiss, then check the leaderboard to find out how you did. Run regularly, and new markers will keep appearing on the map. Run irregularly, and people will call you names from passing cars – and more pressingly, other players will steal your markers.

As you build up your score, you can use your credits to buy markers of your own, and plonk them on the map. Some markers will earn you credits at the expense of your fellow players, and some earn credits for both of you. Some can be put in place and forgotten, like a gym membership. Others will need care and attention, like an expensive fish.

In November, I'll be running the game as a bit of an experiment, and may change some of the rules as we go, to make sure the scoring system is fair, and to iron out bugs. In December, there'll be a prize of some sort, even if I have to make you one myself out of MDF and spare bits of cake. When January comes, I'm hoping we will have a sponsor for the game, and that every marker you collect will win you a Mercedes, or a prize of equal or lesser value.

Please give it a try and see how you get on. The worst that can happen is that someone will work out where you live, and pinch your washing – but I hope it inspires you to run in some new places, and to find adventure in your running.

Friends of Mick'n'Phil Half Marathon News - next week I'll be donning a virtual jumpsuit and leaping from a helicopter to fill you in on this wonderful race, and how you can help. Stay tuned.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Fun to play with, not to eat.

This week, I've finally got around to trawling through the replies to my request for your best pieces of running advice. The answers were extreme, from the machismo of those that could well have come from the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket (or the aerobics teacher we heard once, screaming at her class to grapevine themselves to death), to the caring maternal arm around the shoulder that gently whispers "speed and distance are not important, just take care of yourself, feel connected to the positive energy of world, find inner harmony, and thank your lucky stars you're not like half the people you see wandering round the town centre. I mean, have you SEEN some of them?"

There was a lot of advice to do with remembering to go to the toilet, lots of reminders to stretch properly, how to handle angry dogs, rabid partners, and how to bounce back from a dose of CBA. If there was a common theme, it was that the things that shape our running come from our mistakes, failures, and insufficient toilet paper.

I narrowed the list down to my favourite hundred, and listed them in no particular order for your reference. It's quite hard to get the platitude and plongitude levels just right, but I've tried to put in a mixture, so I hope there's something there for you. If you follow them all, you will undoubtedly be world champion at something, if only on the psychologists report. I've highlighted some of my favourites in bold, and my absolute favourite (and winner of the Running & Philosophy book) came from Dannie Lu, and it simply reads: "Picture the hot, heroic shower afterwards..."

The Rules of Running
Anything, fast or slow, long or short, is better than nothing.Andy_B
You never feel worse after a run (apart from when you do obviously).kjtindall
When you have been injured now for 2 months, you swear never to say you cba again !!Incognito
If you find the going tough, speed up. You naturally want to slow down, but often the body simply needs a change of pace and up is as good!Boycie
If your up with the Kenyans you have gone off too fast....The Terminator
For every mile you run too fast at the start of a marathon add 5 minutes per mile in the last miles.Ultracat
Pass the weak, hurdle the dead!Torry Quine
If Binks can do LANY you can get off the sofaD2
After years trying of new training ideas, I'm convinced it's 99% about what goes in the cakehole. gazzata
Build your cake first, then ice it. Years of easy miles before speedwork.curly45
Be honest about which distance you are best suited to - physically, intellectually and emotionally - then train intelligently for it.Sharkie
Less is more. When running in the rain do not overdress, your clothes will just become wet and heavy and will chafe something rotten!CC2 Speedy Goth
Marry someone who likes running toomilkybar kid
Grow a pair, man up, zip up your man suit, HTFU, etcArgie
to run up hills focus on consistency of effort not speedSpringer
The hardest bit is leaving the house, after that it gets easier!gondii
Stretch, stretch and then stretch again! I found out the hard way.Sunbeater
When going for a PB only worry about the pain in your chest if you have similar pains in your arms and there are no medics around.StirlingM
Find your inner animal and run with it.Wazelle
The best advice is to wear a smile every time you run even when it hurts & you will inspire so many more to run into the hills :-)sparky76
Rotate the surfaces that you run on is a great tactic in order to try and avoid impact related injuries!runjogcrawl13
Every uphill has a downhillhibbyni
Try running naked - without a garmin or watch, as opposed to in the buff ;)Smileygirlie
Never be afraid to find a dock leaf and a bush.Vicksta
You run, your alive. Look at the living dead around you, and feel superiorsadmark
Take your running as seriously as you would anything else that you love, but remember not to neglect everything else that makes you happy as well.Rob-H
Try hangover running, if its a good run, win/win, bad run, blame the hangoverjoolaroon
Prepare gels by nicking each side of the neck with a scissor for easy access during a race.monsenb1
make sure you keep a log of your running and conditions as this will help to motivate yourself on those dark and wet nights coming up???????ck1
Promise yourself just 10 minutes of running slowly, 3 times a week and go for it. You nearly always end up doing more.Debbs
Hills are good for you!billf57
If you are in the last few miles of a race, focus on one at a time and remind yourself you are here to do a job.DuncanG
Eat breakfast, start slow, finish strong. If the finish is going to be more than an hour from the start - eat some more!Scibs
Whether on track, road or fells, you can always find a pint at the end.RobertoM
Run your slow runs a little slower and your fast runs a little faster...Ray K
Think of run like a cake and only take little bites at a time. Soon you will have eaten cake.DPBadger
Put the effort into running DOWN the hills - on the way UP just hang in there.Bru-Bru
Wear a running specific cap. Shades, helps in the rain and can be doffed at the finish line with comedic effect.Watford Wobble
Non-running folk are great company on shorter runs when recovering from injury. Obviously get rid when you return to health :)dallow
If you need to talk over an emotional issue go running with a mate, its difficult to run, breathe, talk & cry at the same time.magsd36
running is as complicated as YOu want to make itmrspenguin
For every run have a goal, be it pace or distance, gradient or terrain, recovery or enjoyment. Make every session focussedNywanda
Rest is just as important as any hard training sessionpaulhiles
Always wear clean pants. What would your mother think?JohnnyO
Consistency allways wins in the end.andy the deestrider
if you can sing Bohemian Rhapsody, you need to speed upIs
Ditch the iPod and connect with yourself, and the surroundings that forged our bodies.Hammy2
Picture the hot, heroic shower afterwards...Dannie Lu
Think how free you are when you run!Frenchie
Stumble out of the door. Run around a bit. Come back in and have a nice cup of tea ( other beverages may be available )MichaelC
The view is always better than any gymsimonweedy
You never regret the runs you do, only the ones you miss.Max71
Never quit on a hill.Discovery Dave
run into work, nothing finer than beating the traffic into town, plus you can plan your day out and you get to start the day on a high!Cressedj
Realise that there is always someone, somewhere faster than you. You are always going to be better than all the lard-arses watching X factorUncle Anesthesia
Dont look to far ahead, in case theres a pot hole! :)Eastham75
Run like you stole it!Ogden Runner
You know your arse looks great in lycra... but no one can see it if your sitting on it. Get out there and give the world a treat!Danny T
Energy gels taste like fruit-flavoured snot. Marzipan is more compact, cheaper and yummier.runnybunny
Keep going man, just keep on keepin on.PerfectOrganism
get a great sports bra!bootsie
Protect your nipples.......Jiffy
Always have a pre race pooSeagrave
Keep your arms in a relaxed position by imagining you are holding each end of a towel to dry your bottom.Jobe
Triathlons are an evil passing fad. You dont have to do one to be cool. You could do an aqualthon or duathlon instead, or enjoy running!Jenelopy
Set a target, mix up your training to keep it interesting, suceed, and look back in fondness at the process; it is all about the process!boyband6666
Running is where your mind takes you when your body is busy doing something else.OllyGoGo
Putting one foot in front of another is easy, until you start runningStano
When racing, make sure you start off at a comfortable pace and then pick people off as you go along.robynjones1982
Change your routes to challenge your body and mind, urban running can give a sense of mileage, but off road can tap into the wild side!muffinking
Commitment in running is important. Patience however, is vital.Adders
Record everything. Make yourself your own personal science project. Embrace your inner geek and see what running does to your body.bigmunnki
Take off your shoes and rediscover at any age, what running like a child felt like. Go bare (keeping modesty!!) and save yourself a fortuneDoodleHappy
accept: it doesnt get any easier; it will make you vomit; everybody is injured. Then you ll enjoy it!olde english
Remember to look up and take in all your surroundings. It makes seasonal runs that much more interesting when you can see the changesbenno
food eaten, drink drunk, kit on,route planned, smile in place, warm up,stride out, start gasping, feel better, , run heart out, love itpete101
Pick a route with no turn-offs or possible shortcuts. The faster you run the faster you finish.paul0
Wear an ID band around your wrist with name, NOK, contact number, etc. Just in case...navyal
know your limits, write them down , screw it up and chuck in the bin, then reach ton the stars , or have a cup of teaTumble
Running is the best cure for the blues I know; it transforms lives whether you are running away or running towards your future.Making_Tracks
when your going to a bad spell in a race, keep in the back of your mind that everyone is suffering and every step forward is one less to goMAD Superman
Beware of Fetch normalisation. It is not normal to run a marathon every weekend. Or indeed even every month.Mrs Winkle
the road never endsDave744
No one ever lays on their death bed wishing they had stayed in and watched more telly.firemannotsam
For drinking on the run, get a water bottle you can squeeze. It's far easier to squirt water into your mouth than to suck it out of the bottleChell
Running is a brilliant lesson for life as it contunually demonstrates that by overcoming pain and ignoring distractions you can achieve your goals.whenim64
If time is limited, do 3 core training runs a week, intervals for speed, steady run for fitness and a long run for stamina.!COGS!
Smiling makes it hurt lessOVERTHELAST
The hard days are what make the easy days easy.Hamster1207
Eat the frog. If you have more than one frog to eat, eat the biggest, ugliest one first.Chopperhound
you always have more energy left than you think, give that last 300 metres a good old kick!!neilh2069
Going away? Borrow a ordance survey explorer map from the local library of the area, photocopy the relevant part and have an adventure run!JP2KME
Beware of rubbing your eyebrows and eyes when sweating - it breaks down the waterproof barrier and the sweat will flow much more quickly into your eyes.iPLOD
Never run away from an aggressive dog or it will chase/bite you. Stand tall, walk towards it, maintaining eye contact till it backs down.sepang
run like you need the toilet in seconds!mexrs
rearviewmirror by Pearl Jamjamesstewart13
The older it makes you feel, the younger it makes you look.KickedIt
Try not to deviate too far from the familiar left foot, right foot combination. Find other ways of introducing much needed variety.simeyk
Wave at other runners as you pass - most will wave back, and it gives the others something to mull over while they run.SGR
If you are struggling in a race, think of someone close to you who faced a greater challenge in life and ask yourself if they would quit.davie y

Site news - I've been a bit quiet this week due to half term, and nearly dying of manflu - but I'm doggedly working away in the background. I'm finally getting round to reading some more books on iPhone app development, but don't get too excited, because nodding at example code is not quite the same as putting together an app that I'd be proud enough to share.

I've also been working hard on the game that I mentioned in the tail end of the previous newsletter. The game will involve plotting your runs very carefully to pick up points, move markers, and discover hidden gems. But wait, there's more. It also comes with an attractive set of steak knives. It also makes julienne fries. It firms AND it tones, and comes with it's own patent-pending cleaning system, with extendable pole for those hard-to-reach areas. You get the picture. Details really soon on this one.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Action figures sold separately.

As promised last time, I'm going to look at each of the four "home nations", to find out who should be rightly crowned the Fetch Champions of the World. A few pointers before I begin - the information I've used is based on your primary location - so if you've set it up to be in a particular place, that's who you're batting for. Secondly, limited time, my limited coding skills, and the fear of getting into trouble with Yahoo! for overuse of their geolocation lookup meant that the Republic of Ireland and the entire rest of the world have been overlooked in this really quite unscientific study. Finally, please try not to be so offended by my national generalisations that you choke on your cheese on toast / Frosted Lucky Charms / deep-fried Mars Bar / jellied eels etc. I would love to offend everyone in equal measure, although I will probably focus mainly on Wales, what with them doing so well in the rugby, and what with us being absolutely world class at self-deprecation.

Here's a quick population breakdown. Adding your location is not compulsory on Fetch, so there are about 20,000 users of no fixed abode to add on to this lot:

I looked at race results, to find out what percentage of runners had achieved a particular standard in races of varying distance. There's a solid win for Wales at 5k with 12.7% of their runners going sub-18 mins, Northern Ireland punch above their weight to take 10k, and England and Northern Ireland claim all the best sporting metaphors at half and full marathon.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are the keenest when it comes to racing - around 30% of their runners competed at 10 or more races in 2010. Wales bringing up the rear, no doubt preferring to spend their Sunday mornings practicing their close-harmony singing.

Next, a quick look at which group trained the most. In the biggest stereotype I managed to unearth, the Scots took the plaudits for running 500 miles or more. Wales led the way for extreme commitment, with the biggest percentage of 3000+ mile runners.

The Welsh famously promise to keep a welcome in their hillsides, so much so that my local ice cream van used it as its ringtone. Wales win again for hilliness, with 66% of their runners experiencing an average climb of at least 50 metres for every mile run.

Scotland pays the price for a poorly chosen latitude, the shorter days undoubtedly a key factor in them having the largest proportion of runners who have recorded at least two injuries over the course of their running careers. The Northern Ireland group are most careful, presumably down to the lush green carpet of shamrocks on every surface.

Having exhausted my enthusiasm in running statistics for this week, I turned my attention to online activity. The English lead the way on the forum and write the most blogs (mostly about the weather), the Scots have the most buddies, pass the most comments on other peoples stuff, and post the most pictures.

And I'm spent. There should be enough stats in there for everyone to feel like they won something. I've added up all the percentages, and I'm pleased to announce that England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are officially joint Fetch Champions of the World. On behalf of Wales and its Rugby World Cup campaign, I would like to forfeit all our points, in exchange for a bit of Irish luck, some brave Scottish arteries, and the general English tendency to do rather well at this sort of thing without making too much fuss.

Site news - the hoodies arrived at Fetch HQ today, and have been lovingly folded into six neat piles, ready to be gently inserted into posting bags and sent out. They're pretty bulky en masse, but we'll be transporting batches to the post office as quickly as we can.

If the dark nights are starting to creep up on you, try the new Daynight skin. It automatically changes to daytime colours as soon as the sun is up, and aids restful browsing with a starry display as soon as the sun goes down.

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey I linked to last week. If you've got five minutes, your input would be appreciated.

And finally... if you're a Conquercise player, you may have noticed a few small changes to the leaderboards and zone browser. My "Road to Damascus" moment came when I spotted a cyclist eating a sausage roll. Any exercise that can be combined with pastry needs to be set apart from the harshness of running, where the body is so finely balanced on the edge of disaster, that anything more complicated than a Peperami can cause untold damage. So the owners and explorers leaderboards now show the percentage of mileage that each player runs / cycles. Look out for a few more updates in the next few weeks, and if I get my act together, a brand new game based loosely around fun, exercise, strategy, and not getting squashed.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. This newsletter may be substituted for one of equal or lesser value without prior notice.

Last time I talked about my VO2 Max test, and I mentioned tempo running as a way to train your body to cope with running fast. In a large nutshell (bigger than a dog, but smaller than a very big dog) it's about exercising at an effort level that means your muscles produce lactic acid at a quicker rate than your body can deal with it, and keeping up that level of effort for about twenty minutes, which is both enough time to train your body, and enough time to make sure you don't have to watch Eastenders. Too fast, and you'll get tired before your body has learnt anything. Too slow and your body will handle the lactic acid just fine thank you very much, and you won't see so much of a training effect. Too sideways and you'll start frightening pedestrians and getting into fights.

The Matterhorn above shows the number of tempo runs registered against each distance - the most popular distance being five miles. However, it's clear that many people include their warm-up mileage when logging tempo runs, so you can probably round that down to four. I looked at over a thousand five mile tempo runs, and the first mile was slower than the average in 71% of cases.

I wanted to get an idea of the effort people are putting into their tempo runs. For each person, I grabbed their best 5k and 10k times, and compared this to their tempo pace. To help counter any warm-up effect, I ignored the first mile of each run, and everything I learned at school.

Our runners do the meaty bit of a typical four mile tempo run at about 12.5% slower than their 5k pace (blue line), and about 8% slower than their 10k pace (red line). Taking a real world example, my recent 10k bestest time was 47:24, or 7:37/mile. Adding 8% to that suggests a tempo pace for four miles of 8:14. However, typical professional advice for calculating your tempo pace is straightforward - just add 20s/mile to your 10k pace. That suggests that either my analysis is flawed - perhaps missing the key parts of what people do in tempo runs (highly likely, I haven't had breakfast yet), or that possibly people run their tempo runs a bit too slowly. If I had my time again, I'd probably pretend this rather inconclusive paragraph hadn't happened. Pretend you've just discovered Patrick Duffy in your shower, and we'll move swiftly onwards.

In an attempt to battle out of the murk, and to feed your insatiable urges for pretty graphs, I took another approach to deconstruct tempo running. I divided the tempo runs up into groups defined by the 5k time of the runners who did them. Then I calculated the typical percentage of each run that was faster, the same as, or slower than 5k pace. Then I lay down in a dark room with a flannel over my face, sobbing quietly and wishing that life was simple. Anyway, here's the graph:

I think this highlights at least part of the reason why the previous investigations found tempo runs to be a bit slower than expected. The faster runners do a very low proportion of their mileage at 5k pace or faster - but slower runners do just that bit more. On the flipside, our faster runners spend more time in the +40s and +60s time brackets than slower runners. All this points to the tendency for less experienced runners to thrash away as fast as they can, resulting in a pace that tails off before it's had chance to have an effect.

So there it is. Another roundabout lesson in remembering that training is about doing it right, and not about battering yourself into the ground.

Site news - the pre-orders for hoodies have been coming in fast and thick. The deadline for ordering is officially today (30th September), but realistically I won't be phoning the manufacturer until Monday, so you've got the rest of the weekend to get your order in.

An OU MSc student has asked me if you lot would help out with a survey that looks into the factors that influence success in online communities. There's some stuff that will be useful for me in there too, so I'd appreciate your input.

That's it for this week. Next time: a Rugby World Cup inspired battle between the home nations. Send me your suggestions for ways in which I might distribute points between them e.g. highest average mileage per runner, most altitude climb per runner, best impression of Jimmy Krankie posted in the gallery, least vowels per runner, etc.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Two drink minimum.

I'm writing this from deep within the sports science laboratory at the University of Bedfordshire. To my left, there are a troop of mice in tiny trainers and headbands, limbering up for a 5k, and to my right, a pack of irritable beagles who stink of breath mints (not really folks, please don't attempt to liberate these imaginary animals from the building). Katie and I have been roped in as lab rats in a study to investigate how well people are able to measure their own exertion levels without watches, heart rate monitors and the like. The idea is that if athletes can develop their own internal gearbox, training programmes become easier to explain without the complications of pacing information.

I thought it would be good to describe some of the stuff that you might find useful when thinking about your own training. Part of the testing involved measuring our VO2max, which is not a shampoo, but a measurement of the maximum rate at which your body can use oxygen. I was strapped into a face mask that covered my nose and mouth, so that all the air I used (except that which I was sucking in through my backside by the end of the trial) whizzed through a special turbine that measured the flow.

I was set to work, pedalling a static bike at a very low resistance level - so my breathing was very easy and gentle. Every three minutes, the resistance was increased, making me work harder and harder to keep the pedals turning over at the required speed. I also had to shout out a number from the Borg RPE Scale to indicate how hard I felt I was working. Alongside this, the technician also measured my blood lactate levels, which involved pricking the ends of my fingertips a frankly impolite and nearly punch-worthy number of times. That's the bit I enjoyed the least, although I am a good bleeder apparently.

I lasted for about 19 minutes, but it only really became painful in the last 3-4 minutes, and Katie informed me that I made some interesting noises towards the end. The following graph shows what happened as my effort levels increased, and may contain data that some people may find disturbing:

Oxygen plays a key part in the production of energy within your muscles, and you can see my oxygen usage rising as I was made to work harder. My heart rate rises up to something close to my maximum, and if I was able to continue exercising, it would stay at that level quite consistently. But the thing that brought me to a standstill is lactic acid. At low levels of exertion, my body clears it out just as fast as it's created. But as the intensity increases and muscles run short on oxygen, lactic acid starts to build up. It's disruptive effect impacts on the muscles' ability to continue contracting, and produces the feeling of pain that left me swearing like a wounded pirate.

The point at which the lactate starts to rise dramatically is called your lactic threshold. I think it corresponds to the first kink on the lactate curve above. You can increase your lactic threshold, and thereby make it more comfortable to run at pace, by including a weekly "Tempo Run" in your training plan - twenty minutes of sturdy running, about 10-15s per mile slower than your 10k pace (if you're a heart rate monitor person, this is where running above the 85% mark comes in). Your body will improve its ability to handle and disperse the lactic acid, and you may find that people you hardly know will buy you flowers.

Site news: if you liked my previous newsletter that investigated the consecutiveness of training and resting over the course of a year, you might like to see your own year-by-year breakdown. It'll show you how often you take breaks from running during the year, and how long those breaks are. Conversely, it'll show you how much running-without-resting you do. Failing that, please consider the environment, and use the electricity more wisely to make tea.

Since the last newsletter, I've also done a bit of tidying up in the forum, to improve the editability of thread headers. One of the side effects of this seemingly tedious update is that I discovered the ten most popular threads on the site. For your enjoyment, they are as follows:

Joke of the day........ (223 watchers)
Heart rate (159)
Ultra Marathons (157)
Things you want to say but can't (146)
BIKE THREAD (124)
More efficient running style (118)
How was your run today? (115)
The Sub 3:15 Marathon Thread (112)
Garmin 305 Tips (105)
TriSport Fetch: The smell of 220 (104)

And finally... in autumn each year we order our annual batch of Fetch Hoodies. If you'd like one, you have until the end of September to place your order, otherwise you'll have to wait a whole year, or fight someone for theirs. Offset global warming whilst looking rather jazzy at the same time - order now for delivery mid-October.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Unregistered address: The Cupboard Under The Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

August was the sort of running month I've been having all year. There'd be one week where I'd go absolutely loopy, and train just about every day; another week where I wouldn't get out at all because of some sort of rest-of-life situation happening, and two sort of mediocre inbetweeny weeks where I'd maybe get out twice. The result: no consistency, no rhythm and most importantly, a failure to nail down this year's "Good For Waistline" times.

This week then, in an effort to cure my current boom and bust approach to training, take my hand and we'll take a wander through some lovely stats that will not just motivate you to run, but motivate you to rest properly too, and aid restful sleep. If nothing else, if I keep talking, I hope you'll at least sit still for five minutes.

I looked at all the Fetchies who had run regularly throughout 2010, and at the typical number of days training involved to reach a specific annual mileage.

I then tried to measure the consecutiveness of training i.e. how many days do people run for before they take a break, and how long do they rest for. I looked at my 2010 runners, and gave them a '1' if they ran one day but rested the next, a '2' if they ran two days in a row, then rested, a '3' for three days in a row, and so on. On the flipside, a '-1' means a single rest day, a '-2' means two rest days, etc. This volcanic superbeast shows the number of times that runners do each of these during the year - rest days on the left, training days on the right:

The dark blue line shows the typical 400-miles-per-year runner. The leftmost side of the rest day side shows that they take a whole week (or more) off at least nine times a year. Compare that to light blue line for the 1400 mile runner, and they take just two complete weeks out. But the key to achieving their high mileage lies at the other end of the rest day spectrum. The 1400 miler takes a single rest day on 60 occasions, but the 400 miler only does this 24 times. So in other words, higher-mileage runners are just as disciplined about taking rest days as they are about running.

Site News - I want to hear your favourite piece of advice when it comes to running. My favourite one will win a copy of Running & Philosophy which is a book what is about thinking and running and so forth, and the best ones will be used to make a forthcoming newsletter. To enter, just log in to the site, and look for the competition details at the very top of the page. If you've already entered, it won't be there any more.

I've also updated the Feedback system. Previously, it asked you to rate the severity of your bugs and problems from nought to ten on some scale of your own imagining. I generally ignored it anyway, choosing instead to pick off the easy ones, until I was left with a bunch of superbugs that were immune to my coding abilities. So now, I'm asking you to choose what sort of timescale you'd expect me to take to respond - anything from "Hey look, I'm just letting you know about this, but if I never hear from you, it's not going to change my life" all the way up to "OMFG - reply now or they say they'll steal my gran - I think they mean it, the one in the sunglasses looks like a proper mentalist". So far it's working well.

And finally... do you like staying awake most of the night, putting your kit on back to front in the dark in a crèche, and then running a half marathon through the middle of nowhere in the headlights of a sinister-looking car that you just can't shake off? If you're free to do this on the weekend of the 16th-18th September, and have had your jabs for Norfolk, then flanker would love to hear from you. The Round Norfolk Relay is part of Fetch heritage, and one of the best weekends I've ever had in a tent.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

There was no newsletter last week, because I was too hot, and there'll be no newsletter next week because I will be busy being too hot in a secret overseas location. Some would call it a holiday, others may prefer to imagine me overseeing the construction of a secret underground lair in a hollowed out volcano just off the coast of Barry Island. If anything goes wrong with the site in my absence, my dad has offered discount tickets to a "songs from the shows" extravaganza, featuring all the old favourites. But anyway... I'm here right now, and ready to commence a hefty braindump - pass the paper...

First up I want to tell you about our exciting new Fetch Race Standards - a way to challenge yourself to run consistently well across a variety of distances. You can aim for any standard, from Diamond (score 90% WAVA at three different race distances), through Gold (80%), Silver (70%), Bronze (60%), all the way down to Kit Kat Wrapper (10%). And because there's a huge gap between these big categories, each percent grade has been named after the world's fastest living things, from swifts and cheetah's, down to domestic cats, elephants and squirrels. If you think squirrels are a bit rubbish, all I can tell you is that in 13 years of trying very hard, my dog has never caught one.

All you've got to do is reach the qualifying scores in three different distances. There's a handy table of qualifying requirements at common race distances, which is specific to your age and gender.

You can track your progress year on year:

And If you'd like a shiny medal on your user profile, don't forget to turn sharing on. Comments from users include:
"oooh! am liking this"
"...it's quite good, I can see it spurring me on in whatever race I run next..."
"Doesn't work for me and I can't see the point."

Next up is a bit of analysis. A few days ago, someone in the forum was asking about long runs, and specifically, what proportion of your weekly mileage they account for. There were lots of mildly conflicting suggestions and rules being flung about, so I thought I'd look at the data. I divided my sample according to the mileage that runners did in the four months before race day, and looked at what percentage of their weekly mileage was achieved in their longest run.

For example, if you do about 400 miles in the build-up to your half marathon, your weekly long run will account for about 40% of your weekly mileage on average. As mileage commitment increases, the proportion of miles completed in your longest run decreases, so that if you ran 900 miles for your half marathon, your long run would account for about 26% on average. There's clear air between the marathon line and the other distances, illustrating the importance of long runs to a good marathon performance.

We all know that when we train for a distance race, our long run increases towards a training peak, but does this go hand in hand with increased overall mileage, or do we give more of our energy towards completing the long run, compromising the rest of our training? This time I split up my sample purely on the number of weeks until race day.

Marathon training shows a clear rise from about 37% four months out, to 43% at training peak, before they taper down - so I reckon it's ok, and probably highly sensible to ease off on your shorter runs as your long runs reach a climax. There's a much gentler story for half marathon (long run percentage rising from 37 to 39%, before a shorter taper), and you can just about see the decline of the long run in 10k and 5k, as speedwork and wearing stretch fabrics take over as the most important factors.

Site news - and there's just a little bit to report. If you find the process of adding races to our Race Listings to be a little bit long-winded, I've done something that will hopefully make the process a bit quicker. If you know that the race already exists in the database (e.g. the previous year), all you need to do is find it, and then click the link marked "Copy This Race To Another Date". Simple (as we used to say before meerkats ruled the world).

Right, time to don my knotted handkerchief, baste myself in sun cream (they don't call it 'sun tan lotion' any more, shame), and cover myself in biblical quantities of insect repellent. Be good, because although there's free wifi in the volcano, I'll be using it to look up cocktail recipes and diagnose tropical diseases.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Milky milky.

As promised last week, I've got some more nuggets of lovely to dispense regarding intervals - the art of taking your body to the peak of exertion, then having enough of a rest to avoid puking, before repeating the exercise several times - all in the name of training your body to cope with the pain of running faster. Possibly the biggest question that people ask is how fast they should run their intervals. I started by looking at all the runners who had achieved a particular race time, and measured the typical pace that they ran their intervals. Here's a graph showing the typical pace that 10k runners do 800m efforts:

You can see how faster runners tend to run their 800's at race pace, whilst slower ones tend to go increasingly faster than race pace. There are many theories for interval pace calculation, but the graph you see above shows what people actually do.

I repeated this exercise for 400, 800, 1200 and mile-long intervals, for 5k, 10k, half and marathon. It's so much more fun than doing a crossword, and you can scribble bits out if they annoy you. With the kind of smoothing-over more regularly associated with Kofi Annan, I was able to develop a single equation that tied together race distance, race outcome, interval distance, and interval time. To help guard against exploding heads and scientific ridicule by my peers, I've hidden it all in a nice shiny interval pace calculator. Please have a play with it, and let me know how it compares to your own experiences.

I also thought it would be kind of nice to see how likely it is that people do intervals, as race day approaches. Or alternatively, I thought I'd redesign the London Underground.

Across the board, interval training ramps up as you get closer to the race. 5k speedwork peaks as the race arrives, but marathon runners start to pull out as the typical three week taper kicks in. 10k and half marathon runners have a smaller taper, easing off for the week before the race.

Site news - and this is more of a call for input rather than me telling you about something I've done. I heard recently about a runner who had been told that she was too slow to run, and been given a hard time by some members of her club. I'm not here to wade in with an opinion, but instead I think it would be great to communicate with as many clubs in the UK as we can, and make a positive statement by highlighting those who are truly willing to open their doors to all-comers.

Any of us with any sense will know that it's a difficult thing to do - it takes commitment, thought, organisation and patience to treat the person who finishes last with the same dignity as the fastest runner. And I know that there are a minority of people who go along to races with absolutely no clue as to what's involved, still drunk from the night before, and wearing the most inappropriate kit imaginable (and that's just the London social gang - Ifankyoo). So what I'm proposing is a voluntary code, a fancy-pants charter if you prefer - something that clubs can say “yes, we work like that” to, in order to look after slower and/or inexperienced runners... and something that runners can point at, to show that they understand and appreciate the efforts of those who organise on their behalf. What I'm hoping for is not a protest or a trial-by-media of those who don't work that way... but instead a positive action, something that will bring together people who just love to run, no matter how fast they can do it, with people who'd love to help them.

If you'd like to see that happen, please let me know.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Asbestos-free since 2005.

I'm sitting amongst cardboard boxes and waiting to move house - and that's not even the most exciting thing happening in my life at the moment, so excuse me if I sound a bit frantic and heady this week.

Let's get going then, and I'll see what I can tell you about intervals that you may not have known before. I've just started doing interval training again after a break of *cough* about two years, and it's easy to forget how painful, addictive and helpful they are. To make sure we're all starting at the same place, a definition: intervals really jeffing hurt, but they help you run faster. Right, are you with me? If not, try my Speed Work 101 newsletter from September 2010, and we'll see you in a bit. It's ok, we'll all wait.

I began by looking at how many people did intervals. To give you an idea of overall numbers about 1200 of you have recorded reasonably regular interval sessions over the last two years - compare that to our regular weekly visitor count of over 5000, and you can see that they are clearly not for everyone.

But how many sessions do people actually do? I looked at the 16 weeks before race day for all our 1200, and counted up the number of sessions. I discounted anyone who'd done them less than four times, to help me separate the dedicated runners from the people like me, who just claim to be doing intervals. When assessing the aesthetic qualities of the following graph, bear in mind that not only did Tony Hart refuse to show my picture in his gallery, but also that the rejection letter came from his legal team.

As you can hopefully see amidst the varicoseness, there's a definite tendency for faster runners to do a few more sessions - a tendency that's more pronounced in shorter races. Less than 10% of the sample did more than 12 sessions in the 16 week period, so it's probably sensible to plan for at least 1 week off in every 4 - and if you're just starting out, you may well find you need a few more rest weeks than that.

Next I looked at the most popular interval sessions. There was a remarkable consistency across the board, suggesting that people have a few regular sessions that they like to do. Over 80% of all the interval sessions recorded in the database involved a total effort distance of between 1.5 and 5 miles, and the most common sessions were:

There was a slight hint that longer distance runners increase the distance and quantity of their intervals, but nothing headline-grabbing - which was surprising. I think that most of us in cattle class shift our attention to distance work when we're marathon training.

I've found some other cool stuff that shows the typical pace that people run their intervals at, comparing it to the sort of race outcome they get... and some more funky graphs that give you an idea when to do your intervals during training - but like most good never-ending publications, and pretty much all the bad ones, I'm going to leave you waiting for that until next week. Besides which, I really should start putting my things into the cardboard boxes, otherwise this move is not going to go all that well.

Site news - and you may have noticed the rather lazily titled "NEWS" buttons on threads and pics in the last few days. They might get a bit of a visual makeover if I get any time, but in essence, the idea is that if you see something newsworthy, click the button to report it, and I'll feature the best ones in the newsletter.

I'd really like to see the newsletter showing off the best bits of Fetch, from amazing inspiring stuff like Bink's run across America, to pictures of Nywanda's cat doing that thing that cats do best. I could try to choose those things myself, but I think it's a lot nicer and a whole box of frogs easier if you all pick your own favourites. "Lots of people doing a little bit" is one of the biggest foundations of the site, whether it's the race guide, the endless barrel of training data that I dip into to write these newsletters, the articles, the ideas that come about in the forum. And lets not forget the flouncers (and indeed, the term "flounce"). They don't just happen you know. My job is not to do all these things for you, but to do all I can to make it really easy for you to do it, and then to just get the fudge out of the way. Spread the love, share the news, fetchball's coming home - can you tell I'm grinning a lot today? Thank you all, I'm so happy!

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Click here to pre-order your limited edition commemorative chocolate vest, available in milk, minty and dog.

In a very early newsletter, I looked at how quickly your 5k time improves, charting the progress of runners from one race to the next, measuring the typical level of improvement. It showed how, for example, a 27 minute 5k virgin could take about 3:15 off their time over the next ten races.

But that's only half the picture. I thought it would be useful to also see the timescales involved in making these improvements. Can you improve your race time week after week, or does each new level of performance take that little bit longer to achieve? I looked at the history of 349 runners who had completed at least twenty 10k races, to see how often and how quickly they were able to beat their times.

The blue curve on the graph above shows how long (in months) it took runners to improve on their first ever 10k time. For example, 23% of runners beat their initial PB inside one month, 57% have beaten it within three months, and 82% had beaten it within nine months. 3% of runners took their PB outside and beat it with a stick, but it still wouldn't lie down, so they gave up, took it back to the shop with a sob story about kittens, and took up extreme fishing instead.

The red curve on the graph shows how long it takes to lower your PB for a second time. Within three months of their first ever race, 22% have now beaten their PB twice. As you can hopefully see though, it takes progressively longer for our field of runners to keep improving. The green curve shows a third improvement, the orange curve a fifth, and the purple curve at the bottom shows what percentage of our field make it as far as ten improvements. Two years after their first ever race, just 9.5% of our field have brought their PB down ten times.

Last week I suggested that if you're about to do your fifth 10k, you've got a 67% chance of a PB. I wanted to show you how that curve pans out. The graph below plots the number of races that our sample runners did, against the percentage of races that they picked up PB at. In simple terms, when you've done twenty 10k's, you've got a 24% chance of a PB, and this falls to 11% by the time you've done fifty. As you can see, the individuals varied quite considerably from this middle ground, showing that there are plenty of other factors at play, mainly your commitment to training, but also I guess whether you've got a particularly streamlined face. Possibly.

I couldn't resist offering this lovely 10k predictomatic graph (below). Find your first ever race time along the bottom row, run your finger, pointy stick, or assault rifle laser-sight up until you hit the red line, then go across to the left to find your likely lifetime best. If you're average. Which of course you're not - whatever made you think that? There are plenty of cases where people stray wildly from this line, myself included - so all graphs should be interpreted with the aid of a rational adult, and a glass of something cold.

Site news - and there's not a huge amount really, unless you're a bit of a programming geek. I've been working on a framework that will make it easier for me to quickly add methods to an API. No it's not live yet, no I don't know when that will be, yes I will probably lose interest the next time a bird flies past the window, and yes I have had my hair cut. Like it?

I've also spent all my spare time in the last two weeks, and plenty of the time that I would normally reserve for things such as sleeping, showering and eating, building the Powerade 10k Challenge website. It's really simple, you just log your best 10k time in the leaderboard, do some training, try to beat it, and you could win buckets of the stuff. Not only does Powerade contain four of the minerals lost in sweat, it's also bright blue, which makes it very difficult to misplace, clearly setting it aside from other sporting beverages.

And finally... congratulations to newly married Fetchies, CB and Early Bird! By the time you read this, I'll have pogo'ed to Come On Eileen, messed up the Macarena, and quietly filled Katie's handbag with enough party sausage rolls and cheeses on sticks for the journey home. Best wishes for the future guys :-) Click the pic below to sign their thread:

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS Thanks to everyone who filled in the survey for the big people down in London. If you've not done so yet, and you like doing surveys, here it is. It's very helpful in encouraging companies to advertise with us, which helps keep the site going, which means more people get married, and I get more cake. Go on, I'll send you a bit of the icing.

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Made from friendly bacteria.

It's an enormous relief to be sitting here writing the newsletter, after the security shenanigans of the last week or so. I spent most of the week writing to hundreds of people who replied to the announcement. There were plenty of people who were understandably upset, but most of your replies were very kind and supportive. A big thank you again to you all for your comments.

And that leads me nicely into my theme for this week. We're all trying our best, sometimes it's not good enough, but that's no reason to be scared of trying. I thought I'd look at how this applies to running. I looked at runners who had raced at 10k, and made predictions about the times they were aiming for. How many fail, how many succeed, and how many go on to become the greatest runner the world has ever seen, winning the Olympics, despite missing the start of the race, solving a crime on the way to the stadium, and using an old pair of shoes made out of potato sacking, having given their own to a bare-footed big-eyed Disney Victorian pauper child the previous night?

The blue line in the graph below shows the percentage of runners who were aiming to PB in their 3rd, 4th, 5th race etc. The red line shows the percentage who actually managed it. For example, in their 6th 10k, 32% of runners predicted that they would go faster, but only 20% managed it.

As you might expect, there's a gradual decrease in the tendency to predict a PB, as it gets harder to do so, and the likelihood of it happening is falling at a slightly faster rate - but that gap between those two lines is belief, hope, optimism and a dogged determination not to look facts in the face - and it's getting proportionally bigger, the more we race. So stick with it champ.

The green line in the graph above shows those people who are either unaware of their running prowess, or else are playing rope-a-dope with everyone else a la "Oh you know, I'm just going to see what happens, not really expecting much, I ran 386 miles yesterday, I've been spending so much time at the Disney Victorian pauper mission, etc etc."

Interestingly, our predictions themselves tend to be a little bit conservative, but this is something that we learn as we gain experience. Runners who have completed three 10k's typically go about 23 seconds faster than they predict, but runners who have completed ten 10k's manage about 11 seconds faster.

And what of those PB dreams? Do they remain lofty ideas, never achieved? Or does time deliver what we hope for? This graph shows the proportion of runners in their 3rd, 4th, 5th etc race, who go on to improve on their PB at a later date. For example, if you're about to do your fifth 10k, you've still got a 67% chance of beating your PB in the future.

If you need a bit of inspiration, whether you've just failed miserably to beat your PB, or whether you've just had your data compromised by a botnetted PC somewhere in China, try this quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

And if that doesn't help, remember that Richard Simmons still loves you. If that doesn't inspire you to run a faster 10k, then you're doing something wrong.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS Just one further thing - the folks down at the Ministry of Magic would love it if you could fill in this survey. Knowing a bit about the mystical folk of the Fetchaway Tree helps them encourage companies to advertise with us, which means the site keeps going, which is a Good Thing.

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Fetch is filmed in front of a live studio audience.

I've absolutely no time for any preamble this morning, because it's never good when the Friday Newsletter comes out on a Monday afternoon. Any less professional, and Matt Allwright is likely to sidle up to me with a huge false beard and ask me to give him a quote for clearing out his gutters.

In previous newsletters, I've dug around the training information that you all record, and then made up statistics that show how much running people do when they train for races. But it's always been my goal to make this information freely available in a useful format. Enter the Large Training Plan Collider. Built from an old winding engine, and situated in an disused slate quarry just outside Merthyr, it's been smashing your training data together to create the worlds most average training guide.

There are lots of you aiming for particular times in races, so I thought it would be good to help you find each other. Visit the Race page, and you'll see I've made a jazzy little grid, putting everyone into groups. If you enter target times for your forthcoming races, the system will highlight the best-fit groups for you.

I'm hoping to get down to about 45 minutes at the Bedford 10k in September, and so the system has put me into the 44 minute group. I was pleased to see that there are 75 other runners currently aiming for the same target. Click the group, and you're taken to a page that looks a bit like this:

On the left, you can see the other members of the group, and when they're planning to reach their targets. In the middle column, there's room to share your comments, followed by a table that shows your training data in the build up to your race. You might find the system of weeks a bit unusual - week 0 is the seven days immediately before your race, week 1 is the seven days before that, and so on.

The final column is the really interesting one, especially if you're a fan of graphs and science fiction and the like. The system has looked at every person who has achieved the goal you're aiming for - including that bloke in the polo shirt, tailored shorts and leather sandals who seems to be at every race I've ever done, and the camel who finished just behind me at the Maidenhead Easter 10, and robbed me of all sense of achievement. Check out this list of compulsory people at races, to see who's been included. In amongst all the freakish performers, there's a bit where all the normal people live, and it's this meaty middle that provides the numbers for the graphs.

To take my 45 minute 10k as an example, the graphs show that typical mileage is about 23-24 miles a week, with a little taper down to 21 in the last week before the race. I should be going out four times a week, averaging about three-and-a-half hours of running in total. Overall my training pace should average out at about 9:15 minutes per mile, and I should aim to do a regular long run of about 9 miles.

As with any device that can accidentally create a black hole and swallow the entire universe, or at the very least make a real mess of your knees, there are some important things I should say to ensure you don't treat these graphs as law. By continuing to exist, you agree to the following:

1. Taking averages (well, median's actually, but 'average' is easier to say) removes a lot of important detail. One man's rest week is another man's effort week. Taking the average leaves you with the benefit of neither.
2. You are not average either. Some people need to train for longer, and other people are gits.
3. Always check the number of runners in the red box. For example, there were only six runners in the 1hr36 10k group, so the graphs are correspondingly wayward.
4. No indication is given on how to break the weekly mileage down into individual sessions. Hills, intervals, tempo runs and other hard effort sessions play an important part in helping you to get quicker. I hope to offer more guidance on that in the future.
5. This is not a schedule for beginners. I looked at people who were training the whole time. If you're starting from scratch, search our list of training plans for something suitable that matches where you are.
6. I'm not that good at hard sums. My degree was called "Maths for Intelligent Systems", but it doesn't necessarily imply that the mathematician is equally intelligent.

That's all for now - I hope you enjoy fiddling about with this, and would love to hear what you think of it, either through feedback, or on the public thread. Before I go, a quick marketing message - please consider entering the race if you can, as it all helps to show that Fetch is a good website to advertise on, which in turn gives me a mandate to keep churning out this sort of nonsense. Thanks.

"Get those running shoes primed and ready for the K-Swiss City of Manchester 10k at 9.30am on July 3rd at Sportcity, Manchester. Starting and finishing on the Regional Athletics Track next to Manchester City FC, it will be a superb race this year. Enter online here".

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Two atoms were walking across a road when one of them said, "I think I lost an electron!" "Really!" the other replied, "Are you sure?" "Yes, I 'm absolutely positive."

I'm taking a break this week, so your dose of Friday Fetchness is delivered by Monki, who will explain how it's impossible to lose your mojo. I expect you all to have been running by the time I get back.

See you next week,
Fetch

Ever lose your running mojo? I'm going to explain how to find it - if it really exists - and how to stop yourself from losing it again.

Runners suffer a lot from the Goldilocks Syndrome. We like to have a good moan unless things are just right. We will moan, at length, and with seemingly endless enthusiasm, about the weather, entry fees, the accuracy of Garmins, the behaviour of non-runners, runners who do things differently, other people being wrong on the internet.. Especially other people being wrong on the internet.

However, the complaint that I see most often on the Fetch forums is 'I've lost my running mojo'. I've always been a little mystified by this statement. It sounds wrong, like an excuse. And that's because it is just that - an excuse. Let me explain..

'Mojo' is a word that has indeterminate origins, but the most commonly accepted source is an African witchcraft ritual. Your village shaman would prepare the ingredients or items to create a spell and place them in a 'mojo' pouch or bag. You would draw the strings of the pouch shut, and wear it round your neck or your waist. You literally 'got your mojo on'. Over time, the meaning shifted to mean both the bag, its contents (ie the spell) to the desired outcome of that particular mojo - most often to make someone fall in love with you, or make you more fertile, or to improve your sexual prowess.

The word entered Western consciousness, like a lot of things designed to get you in a heap of trouble or misery, via the blues, reaching a zenith of sorts in the Doors' song 'Mojo Risin' - penned by the biggest ego that ever walked the planet ('Mojo Risin' being an anagram of 'Jim Morrison'. Except for that extra 'm', Jimmy. Nice try though).

Most of us now associate 'mojo' with the character Austin Powers - although there was a spectacularly awful 'hip' music magazine of the same name for a while. The Austin Powers films, some of the flimsiest parodies in movie history, at least used 'mojo' in its proper context. When Powers gets his 'mojo' back, he regains the ability to ensnare ever more attractive women in his bouffant, knock-teethed embrace, ie he never lost his desire, he lost his ability.

So it is highly unlikely that all these runners have really 'lost' their mojo. Unless they are running to pull the fit bird/bloke next door. In which case they probably need to have a hard stare at themselves in the mirror after their next run. Not pretty, is it? Just as well, really, as otherwise there would be mass orgies at the end of races. Perhaps there are, and I'm too busy looking at my splits to notice. I digress.

But the idea of 'running mojo' appeals, precisely because it is somewhat vague. After all, there is no simpler (or scarier) thing to moan about - or live in fear of - or lose, even - than something that we can't see, touch or describe. That's assuming that most of us don't have an age-old leather bag full of ostrich feathers, mouse skulls, lizard's tongues and a sweet potato carved in the shape of your running nemesis. You do? How nice. You probably run a lot of intervals, don't you? Shine on, you crazy diamond.

However, there is a simple solution. Picture what you think your running mojo looks like. It doesn't really matter what you choose, but try to give it physical (or at a push, spiritual, properties). What does it look like? Is it like a bottle or a water tank? Or is it like a goblin, or a dog? Or something else, like a door? All of these objects are potential problems. The tank needs filling. The dog needs restraining. The door needs a key. Whatever you have pictured, find a physical object that will either solve or represent the obstacle you have just pictured eg a breakfast bowl, your front door key, your favourite mug, a ribbon, a leash, a picture etc.

Don't choose anything to do with running, as that will defeat the object, and ultimately, defeat you. Your running mojo must be working when you are not running, see? We don't want it festering in a cupboard.

Got that? Congratulations. You have just found your running 'mojo'. Each time you eat from that bowl, or drink from that mug, touch your key, or see the ribbon/picture - whatever - you will feel, no, you will know, that you are a runner. Your running mojo is where it always is.

Now pull your trainers on and get outside. And stop moaning.

Happy Running,
Monki

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It's funny how things change. The other day, I was lolloping along the pavement, minding my runny business, listening to my music, when some bigger boys rounded the corner. They filled the path, a row of parked cars blocking a quick diversion onto the road. At one time, I would have relied on the "close your eyes, speed up and dip your shoulder in the direction of the one with the flimsiest moustache" approach, but before I'd had the chance to make that decision, they made a gap for me, and made generally encouraging noises. So what has changed? My prejudices? No, I completed the whole manoeuvre whilst listening to the theme tune from Doodle Doo.

Having kids affects your life in every possible way, not just your running playlist. I asked the folks on the Fetch Pregnancy Club and Getting fit again after pregnumpcy threads (two of the loveliest and most supportive threads on the site btw) to share their experiences, and I also dug about in training logs, to see what I could find. I'd like to say a great big thank you to everyone who contributed.

Before you read on, I must say that the most important advice I can urge you to follow is to remember that running is not as important as looking after yourself and the children who will help you press the buttons on Fetch when you are too old to do so. Be careful out there.

First of all, I looked at how mileage tails off and returns before and after birth, and I asked some mums about their approach. There were some that chose not to run at all as soon as they discovered they were pregnant, and others that ran right up until two days before their waters broke - so it's really down to you. The graph below shows a median figure for the nine months of pregnancy on the left, and nine months post birth on the right. Each mum was different in terms of their mileage, so the line represents their mileage as a proportion of their maximum mileage month during this time. So for example, 0.25 means running a quarter of your highest mileage.

Within a couple of months of taking part in a magic love-wrestle, mileage is down to about 30% of normal, all speedwork ditched. Even the most active mums in the sample were down to 40%, and about 10% stopped running completely. The first trimester was often the hardest, due to morning sickness and lack of energy - several mums recommended a heart rate monitor for controlling exertion levels. One mum said that she stopped wearing a watch and didn't log runs, to avoid the pressure to perform, but some mums were heckled and given a hard time for continuing to run. Your centre of gravity changes, and your muscles relax as you move towards birth, so be prepared to feel "clumsy and anxious". Walking, yoga, pilates and swimming were the most popular recommendations for cross-training, and wearing more than one sports bra was also highly recommended (I tried it, and needed a lie-down with a damp flannel after).

Post-pop, it seems that those who are able, are keen to get on with it, but in the first couple of months this translates into less than 10% of usual mileage, starting with walking. It's a billion times more important to look after yourself now, and that includes not pushing yourself too soon. Enjoy being the only inhabitant of your body, and recognise what you've been through - it'll all come back when your body is ready.

Nine more months down the line, and mileage was creeping up, but still only at about three-quarters of usual volume. For babies born in 2010, about a third of mums have so far managed to improve their WAVA, albeit by a small amount, but the fact that new mums find the time to run and race at all is frankly inspirational. Pretty much all the mums from 2009 and earlier have increased their WAVA - I hope Paula Radcliffe is reading this.

Lots of mums said that becoming a parent brought with it a mental toughness to handle the mind games that training and racing throw at you. They also say how important running can become, a window of time to yourself, to give you the power to handle the nappies, feeding, and sleep-depravation-fest. The fact that it's often harder to get out for a run meant that mums felt it important to make it count.

Partners and families - give your loved one a chance to escape for a few miles, and don't go mad when you're left with a million instructions. This is a big chance for you all to work together to help each other - negotiate time for you all as individuals, and as a group.

If you can't get help to look after little ones, running buggies are a fantastic way of letting you keep up some exercise without having to leave your baby at home with the TV control and a bag of Doritos. It's a new way of running, with new challenges, so be prepared to discover new muscles and aches, and bear in mind that your club and local races may struggle to understand just how awesome you are for doing it.

Oh, and that line about a marathon being tougher than childbirth? It's bo*****s!

Happy Running,
Fetch

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I can picture the scene, a few years from now. I'm penniless and forever hungry, moving with lean efficiency, endlessly travelling, a detached expression on my face, my arms forever marked by a thousand Sharpies. It starts so innocently. Your friends all do it. They come back giggling like loons, talking incessantly in ways you can't quite understand, and eating their bodyweight in Minstrels. They get you started. It's all so simple. Let's get this clear folks, triathlons wreck lives.

I did my first tri yesterday, and I thought I'd talk you through it, so you too can recognise the signs, and maybe save yourself from the fate that now awaits me. It's a bit long, so settle in with a cup of tea, or go out and do something less boring instead. Kids - don't do triathlon!

Kit
Here are what I consider to be the important things you'll need to develop your habit. These were the actual items I used, with the exception of the socks, which were later destroyed in a controlled explosion.

A pair of goggles (I wish I'd worn the ones with the scary clown hologram), a helmet (mine was £60, but you can get them much cheaper if your head isn't in the 99th percentile of circumference), running shoes (I chose the lightest ones I had), a pair of socks (low ones, so they're easy to get on), a towel (to wipe your feet after running across the grass in the transition area), something warm to put on before and after (religious favourites recommended), a number belt (quickest way to move your number from back to front as you transition from bike to run), a lovely partner to train with and talk you into it in the first place (hi baby, I'm so proud of you, thank you for all your support, you did it!), a watch (waterproof is handy, but you can leave it with your bike if not, there's no time to look while you swim), a bike (more on that later), a good website for logging your runs (others are available), plenty of Marmite on toast (other foods are available), a drink (a quick slug of water in transition did me), a good event (Galeforce were great), a decent foot pump (hard tyres = fast), and a sausage skin (aka Tri Suit, complete with Super Pig impression).

Swim Training (8 swims since Jan 1st, total mileage 2.00, furthest swim 600m)
This was my least favourite part. Since we got our tri heads on in January, I've swum two miles, over the course of eight visits to the pool, four of those by January 18th. I lasted seven minutes on my first outing, and my arms felt like the string had been taken out. Within a couple of sessions, I'd built up the fortitude to complete the 400m race distance, and gotten a bit more confident in the water, but I decided that even if I tried really hard, I wouldn't reduce my time by much - so it became a case of getting through it painlessly and panic-free.

Bike Training (14 rides since Jan 1st, total mileage 140, furthest ride 15 miles)
The bike represents the biggest opportunity for improvement for a beginner triathlete. I started out in January on a mountain bike that cost about a hundred quid from Halfords. The brakes squeal, the front wheel squeaks, and it weighs about 40lbs. My first effort ride was six miles at 5:10/mile. I found out how to set the saddle height to make the most of my leg power, I changed the knobbly mountain bike tyres for some smooth thinner ones, and I bought a decent foot pump, and pumped them up to the maximum recommended pressure. The difference was amazing, and my second ride was eight miles at 4:12/mile - an improvement of 20% straight away! Over the next few months, we rode once a week, upping the mileage to race distance (15 miles). I improved a bit more when I managed to borrow another mountain bike that was ten pounds lighter, and a good deal less squeaky. It was also really useful to learn the race route, so we knew when to let rip, and when to conserve energy for hills.

Run Training (62 runs since Jan 1st, total mileage 224, furthest run 8.6 miles)
If you're a runner considering triathlon, then you don't need my advice here. The race distance was just 5k, so it was well within reach - but the hardest part was getting used to the feeling you get when going from bike to run. A brisk twenty minute bike session is long enough to get your legs into cycling mode, and it then takes at least a mile of running to feel like you own your legs again. It feels like you're running on the spot, or that your legs are actually on back-to-front. But despite feeling like you're hopping through the jelly of pain, it can actually produce a pretty fast run - I've been 8-minute miling when it's felt more like 10.

The Race
The scariest thing about the race was wondering whether we'd manage our way through transition without forgetting something vital, before being swooped upon by a marshal with a whistle and a clipboard, instant disqualification, and an early bath. Despite the race being just half a mile from the house, we got up at 5.30, and arrived at registration at 6.15, ninety minutes before our start time. We queued up, had our race numbers drawn on our hands (Katie still has hers, washing up graph to follow in a future edition), attached our numbers to our belts, and I nervously made my way through a banana. Showing our numbers to the transition police, we took our bikes and kit to the rack, choosing a space near the end, so they'd be easy to find (although my bike stuck out amongst all the jazzy racing ones). I discovered that my handlebars didn't fit under the bar unless I raised the saddle way up in the air - so I practiced that a few times. Looking round, people seemed to have brought plenty of stuff, quite often in large plastic boxes. I arranged my inhaler, Garmin, helmet, number belt, and drink, and then rearranged them another dozen times until I'd got the right feng shui. I then realised that I needed to take my shoes and socks off, and that I had nothing else to put on my feet, so I practised wandering round in bare feet. Time had flown, and we just about had time to get our warm clothing into the locker before the race briefing. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Galeforce Events for flawless organisation, overlooking the fact that they did not erect enough wind breaks along the bike route.

We were directed to the pool, strapping on our ankle chips like young offenders, and to line up in number order at poolside, so Katie and I said farewell (she's a magic fish to my Mary Rose) and I made my way to position 36 in the queue. They put the slowest swimmers first, and release them every 20 seconds, picking off the ones who aren't visibly trying, with a sniper hidden in the cafeteria. We were encouraged to chat with our fellow queue-dwellers to sort ourselves into time order, and the chat with number 35 (who won his age category!) helped keep me calm. The highlight of the wait was watching the two girls in flowery bikinis who swam breast stroke and waved at each other as they crossed mid-length. Numbers ahead dwindled, and my nerves increased until it was time for me to get in. Head straight under the water (thanks HappyG) and a wave from Katie, and 3,2,1 go.

Despite dreading the swim, it felt quite wonderful to be under the water and underway. The lanes were quite narrow, but not too crowded. I got my toes fondled a few times (the sign that the swimmer behind wants to overtake), which was handy as it gave me a few seconds every now and then to catch my breath. Before I knew it, I was completing the last length (conscientiously touching the wall at the end before clambering out at the steps), and running through the open doors, blinking into the sunlight. It was all a bit blurry. Elsie Too and mini-Too yelled good luck as I ran over the timing mat into transition.

My bike was easy to find, and I sat on the grass, wiping my feet, pulling on my socks with the minimum of swearing, tugging on my shoes, and switching my Garmin to the right mode (I'd done this earlier, but it had gone back to bed in my absence). Helmet on, unrack the bike, and out through the transition funnel, over another timing mat, and into the car park where a marshall gave me the nod that it was ok to mount up.

The first mile is a gentle uphill, across three roundabouts, and two pedestrian crossings - so I was delighted to make it through them all with no stops. It felt like hard work, and the wind was combining with my soggy tri suit to leave me feeling a bit cold, but I knew that the second mile was downhill, so I'd have time to get act back together then. I passed mostly mountain bikers, and even a couple of road bikes, but got taken by a few more as the third mile turned into the first climb. I tried to encourage the riders I passed, and got some nice comments in return. I've struggled with hills, but I decided to drop down the gears at an early stage, and keep up my pedal speed so that I wouldn't get too ragged. It seemed to be a decent strategy, and left me much happier about being passed by the road bikes. I sat in my saddle and pedalled away at my own pace, as they raised their lycra-clad bottoms in the air like biking baboons. The wind (not from the bottoms) was also a tough one to contend with - I was blown sideways at one point and had to tug the bike to bring it back under control. The adrenaline helped me to my fastest mile ever, and I began to enjoy the whole thing immensely, plotting forward and planning my next burst of speed. With one more hill to climb, I strengthened my resolve by pretending I was Han Solo flying the Millenium Falcon out of the Death Star ("I hope that old man got that tractor beam out of commission, or this is going to be a real short trip. Ok Chewie! Hit It!"), and hurtled my way back to transition, with another wave to Elsie Too.

The marshalls were waiting to slow me down with some "Well done"s, and I did a little skid, and was thankful for the kerb as I swung my feet off the bike. The familiar jelly legs feeling hit me straight away, but it was good to be pushing the bike towards transition, as it gave me a bit of time to adjust. Across the mats, rack the bike, helmet off, a blast of the inhaler, and a squeeze of my drink, and I was out again and running. It's a sharp turn right, then two complete laps of the park, then a half lap.

My first glance at the Garmin told me I was running about 8:40/mile, but I didn't feel capable of going any faster, just happy to survive and plod out the rest. The first part of the lap is a gentle uphill and I felt a bit crampy at this point too. But the downhill that followed was a godsend, and my pace improved. For the first time in a race, I found myself having a chat with another runner (Hi Rob), we 8-min miled, and I started to gain control of my legs. The wind on the second half of the lap was tough, but it was also where the supporters (Elsie, and Katies family) were, and they cheered me on, and told me she was doing well. I waved goodbye to Rob in the second lap as he took the diversion to the finish, and plodded away, round again, through the wind, up the hill, down again, battle on, Super Pig impression, and then finally, mercy, the half lap, and the finishers funnel.

And that was about it. Reunited with Katie at the finish - we hugged A LOT, we smiled A LOT, we ate A LOT, and we were VERY TIRED for the rest of the day. And we've entered another one!

Just a little bit of site news - I'm pleased to announce that Fetchie "old-and-smelly" has won a copy of Daniel's Running Formula, for this fabulous drawing of his run around the Aesee Lake in Münster, Germany. We'll have another competition soon.

Happy Running,
Fetch

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This time next week, I'll be getting ready for my first triathlon. I'm pretty sure I'll get round - I can swim the distance with only a few drinks, I've cycled the course enough times to know when to start pre-emptive swearing, and I know what it feels like to run after pushing it on the bike (it feels like you're made of Lego, and someone has put your legs on back to front). I'm really quite excited.

When I ran my first 10k race, I had no particular idea about how to train - so I was a bit of a one-pace runner. I'd covered the distance a couple of times before the race, with a best of 1:02:33. But the thrill of the day, the confidence of completing a challenge, the inspiring stadium finish, and finding myself for the first time amongst people who liked doing the thing that I'd fallen in love with - all pushed me on, and I ended up with 59:06.

So what I want to look at today is that first race kick - the improvement that comes from the thrill of race conditions. I found 444 runners who have recorded a 10k as their first race, and had also recorded at least ten training sessions in the five weeks before the race. First up I looked at how many had run at least 10k in training:

About 21% of runners don't conquer the distance until the day, and at the other end of the scale, 10% of first timers exceed half marathon distance. In the middle, you can see a whole load of runners who peaked at the actual race distance, so I think a lot of runners attempt a 'run-through' of sorts before the day. There's also a smaller peak at 16k (10 miles), which must be down to the psychological boost of reaching double figures - unless of course there's a running club somewhere with a very bad bus service. Incidentally, it's the faster runners who tend to run the furthest - this graph shows the longest run broken down by 10k ability:

How does training pace for these noobs compare to their first 10k time? I used the Riegel calculator to predict 10k pace for runners based on training runs in the 7-13km bracket, and compared this to their race times. I looked at their first race, and their tenth race. If the excitement of racing is something that wears off, we might expect to see less of a difference between fastest run in training, and race pace. Of course, more experience means that you save your hardest running for races, not training - but I'm going to assume that in the five weeks before each race, you'll gut the pig at least once. Here's the graph:

On the face of it, if you're in the 35-40 minute bracket, you might go up to 10% faster on race day, but of all the runners in the sample, if anyone has a natural ability to know what they're doing, it's those guys. But there's a definite increase in pace on race day across the board, and that effect is lessened by the time the runner has completed ten races. Obviously it gets harder to keep making big improvements as you continue racing, which muddies the water that I would already be hesitant to drink, but I would like to think that at least *some* of that first race power comes from the sheer thrill of it all. My skills at number cuddling make it hard to find that out, so it would be cool to find out your experiences - if you've got a minute, please answer this poll about first race improvement.

Site news - voting is taking place to pick the best drawing in our competition to win a copy of Daniel's Running Formula. There are some fantastic efforts - and I'll publish the winner in next week's newsletter, subject to super-injunctions.

If you run a route regularly, you might be interested in comparing your progress on different occasions (if this sounds dull, try Bob's Burgers instead). You can find this under a new tab called "Split Comparison" when you view one of your Routes. Check out this screenshot, which shows my recent times at Milton Keynes parkrun, broken down into quarter-kilometres:

You can choose the size of the splits (anything from a quarter of a kilometre up to two miles), choose between cumulative time and individual split times, and you can look at your best performances or your most recent ones. It also highlights your best split times along the way. I'm working on something that will let you compare any two runs irrespective of route, but that's still at the testing stage, by which I mean if you tried it now, you'd probably need a cup of strong sweet tea to help you recover.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Voted world's best sandwich filling once again in 2011.

It's officially one year since the first ever Fetch Weekly Newsletter and I still have most of my original teeth. I'm also pleased to have made it through an entire year without using any word more than once. Hopefully you've all forgotten what was in the old newsletters, and I can just send them out again, updating the topical references to keep things sharp and up-to-date. Here's hoping for another great year, and a successful return to competitive running for Paula Radcliffe Floella Benjamin.

Don't forget to enter our drawing competition, for a chance to win a copy of Daniel's Running Formula.

Having promised to regurgitate everything, I thought I'd try to do it all in one go, so next week we can continue with the business of pushing back the frontiers of cutting edge running science. So here's everything we've learnt so far - set your video to record it, and play it back at half the normal speed.

80% of the people who run the London Marathon will race again. Different types of race distances and terrains peak at certain times of the year. If you run your first 5k in 29 minutes, by the time you've run another nine of them, you'll have taken about four minutes off your time. The centre of the running universe is just outside Leamington Spa. It's harder to get a good WAVA score in longer races. Putting the words "World Cup" in the title of your newsletter will instantly divide your audience. The mileage and time commitment you need to run a speedy half marathon starts to climb like mad when you get below 1hr 40. To achieve the same outcome, women and people in their fifties run more miles than men and people in their twenties. Faster 5k runners do tighter splits, and the fourth kilometre is the hardest. This website is mainly run by a rescue dog. A typical 32 minute 10k runner clocks up a thousand miles in the four months before the race. About 15-20% of runners do weekly cross training. McGoohan is awesome. Faster runners run comparatively slower than slower runners. Faster triathletes take a bit longer on the bike. 30% of runners wear ASIC's, and most shoes get retired at about 400 miles. Over a five year period, a typical runner will rack up about 12 months where they do less than half their average mileage. The biggest mileage months for runners are March and September. For cyclists, it's June and August. Swimmers are confusing. The size of your intervals is related to the length of the race you're training for. Not everyone likes it when you change the design of the site. 2hr20 half marathon runners do their long runs at race pace, 1hr20 half marathoners go a whole minute slower than race pace. Make your marathon taper weeks 90%, 70%, 30%. Knees and feet are the most fashionable bits to injure. By the time you've run your tenth half marathon, you'll be doing about 30% more mileage in training. Running with music is both good and bad. Seven o'clock in the evening is the most popular time to go running. Runners switch from complaining about it being too cold in April, to complaining about it being too hot. This continues until October. Speedwork, recovery runs, and actually running are decent indicators of being a faster runner. Pretty much everybody runs a positive split in a marathon - slower runners moreso. If you want to enjoy your happiest run ever, be female, be born in the sixties, and go for a run one morning in April 2007. The 15th of December is the time when runners give in to the power of Christmas, and the best month to get a PB is October. 35% of New Year New You runners do less running in the second week of January. Faster triathletes spend 50% of their time biking, slower ones do just 35%. 10k is the most popular distance amongst runners. Conquercise seems to have gone down really well, unless you've got a thing about cyclists. 12% of men list snooker as their preferred method of keeping fit - if you get out for a run a few times a week you're NOT underachieving. In four months before a marathon, most runners take at least five weeks a little bit easier. Nearly half of all runners will PB at another distance following a marathon. Taking a minute off your 50-minute 10k PB is about the same as taking four minutes off your 60-minute 10k PB. Club runners do more mileage, and do better in marathons. Less than half of you always stretch after running, and only 12% stretch before. 8% of runners find that their friends and family don't approve and even try to discourage them from running. Typical marathoners will run twice in the week after the race.

If you've enjoyed the newsletters, please feel free to forward this onto your friends, and to paste it to your club noticeboard or forum, or copy it out by hand onto a giant sandwich board and hang round the town centre. Fetch Everyone :-)

Happy Anniversary,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Quarter-finalist in the World Snooker Championship 1991, losing 13-8 to the eventual winner, John Parrott.

Welcome to your special edition, print-out-and-keep Wills and Kate Unofficial Royal Wedding Special Newsletter. In producing it, I hope to win the award for the most tenuously connected product. Try typing "Royal Wedding Offer" into Google, and hit the "Shopping" tab. There's a lovely shoe rack. That's the sort of thing I'm up against.

In the nicest possible way, you can go find your own graphs this week. I've added a new one to the training log 'spectacles' view. It's available for runs that have been imported with full route information (e.g. from a Garmin, TCX, GPX, PWX, or FIT file). It shows you how well you cope when you're running up and down hills. The numbers on the bottom axis represent the grade of the hill - for example 1:10 means that the hill goes up one metre for every ten metres you go along it. It's a bit of an experiment, so your experience may vary, but here's a nice example, taken from my attempt at the Bedford Half Marathon in 2009. You can see a difference of about 1.6mph between the friendliest downhill and the deathliest uphill.

You may also have noticed that a Routes tab has appeared in the top menu. It's not a new feature, but until now it's been lodging like an uncomfortable metaphor in the bowels of the Training section. I thought it was about time it saw a bit more sunlight.

Competition Time!!!
Thanks to GPS and Google Maps, we can all plot our runs with the precision previously reserved for posting sticks of dynamite in a dictator's Frosties. But a list of latitudes and longitudes, however impressive, will always fail to record the bits that we remember with ease. There was the time when a kid chucked a snowball at me and I caught it and threw it back. There was the time when the dog fell in the canal. And all those races that seemed as though they'd been designed by MC Escher.

So in an attempt to capture some of your memorable runs, routes and moments, I thought it would be good to have a competition. Wooo! All you've got to do is draw and upload a picture of your favourite route, race, or indeed any moment in your running career that's particularly memorable. I've spent the week with what feels like a grapefruit lodged in my throat, so I've been a bit too poorly to run, but I took my little boy out for an ice cream, and we came up with the following example route:

As you can see, you don't have to be a great artist or technical whizz to take part - we drew this with biro and felt tip, and took a picture of it with my phone. See the lovely shading on the ice-creams? You've got until May 13th to upload your picture, and we'll vote for a winner. Standard competition rules apply (which can be paraphrased as "Don't interrupt me when I'm eating").

A copy of Daniel's Running Formula is waiting for the winner. It's one of my favourite running books, with plenty of decent-sounding science and pretty graphs to back up its descriptions of different types of training run, and some good advice on how to build a training schedule. Although it offers some pretty intense technical advice, it's also nice to see that the information they provide is fairly inclusive (for example, they show marathon information from world record pace to to five hours).

That's all for this week. Pip pip.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Alas! Ear wax!

Judging by the viewing figures on the site over the last few days, the majority of you must be sitting in the back garden with knotted hankies and rolled up trousers, soaking up the sun, and warming up for Uber-Bank-Holiday-Fest with a warm lager, in a 100% official Wills and Kate pint glass. For those of you unfortunate enough to be wired up to the internet at such a time, I've packed this newsletter with double the usual amount of detritus, to keep you entertained until normality returns.

As I write, 440 Fetchies have supplied their London Marathon times, with a fantastic 234 personal bests, and 67 of you who beat their pre-race predictions. It's been quite fashionable over the years to have a dig at "The" marathon, but this year all I've seen is positivity - and I'm glad about it. It's hard not to feel a bit emotional at the sight of so many people, experienced and otherwise, doing the thing we all love/hate. If you've ever run any sort of distance before, you'll have recognised your own memories etched on the faces of the multitude as they gurned, grimaced and grinned their way along. And if you're anything like me, you'd have sold your gran's false teeth to be there with them (with the other runners, not with the teeth).

The first ever Fetch Newsletter looked at what became of the London Marathon Class of 2009 - but I thought I'd put post-marathon runners in general under the microscope, and find out what happens when they are released back into the wild. Do they scamper off merrily as though nothing has happened, or lay doggo for a bit and lick their sore bits?

I started by looking at the seven days immediately post-race, to see how much running our marathoners did. The advice I've always stuck with is to get out for a very short and gentle trot the day after the race, to keep things moving, and to help your muscles clear out, and to take a very easy week. My last marathon was in 2008, but I can still remember the little jog I managed the day after, and how useless my legs felt - but I do think that my recovery was all the better for it.

The graph above shows the typical number of training sessions completed by runners over the seven days following the race. It's an unusual one to read. For example, the typical number of sessions completed in the first day after the race is 0.2, which is to say that only about 20% of runners will run on the first day. By the end of day three, all the 3hr runners will have been for a run, and by the end of day seven, the 3hr runners will have been out 3 times. Slower runners have a more gentle approach, topping out at around 2.4 sessions within the seven days post-race.

To compliment the first graph, I looked at the mileage collected by marathoners in the seven days post race. The 3hr runners clock up just over 22 miles, whilst slower runners manage something in the region of 17 miles. Note that this graph isn't telling you to add to your mileage every day, it's just showing a smoothed out version of what you'll probably manage in 2-3 chunks over the course of the week.

So what happens the following week, and the one after that? When does normal mileage return? Unsurprisingly, given the very leading nature of my line of questioning, I have a graph to show you. I looked at the peak mileage of our marathon-running lab mice in the 16 weeks that followed their race (I'm imagining that for most folks, normality will have returned somewhere inside four months). Then I measured their mileage each week as a proportion of that amount. Then a stork came and gave me a special cuddle, and I produced the following:

In the seven days after the race (week zero), runners typically operate at about 44% of their regular maximum. This rises to 82% in the following week, and reaches the nineties in week eight. So it's perfectly normal to gradually ease back into your running over a couple of months.

Site news - and stalking just got easier and fun. Add people to your buddies list, and visit the People section of the site, to get the latest information on their mileage, recent training, and forthcoming races, and the day they put their bins out, all on one page. Here's how it looks:

If you own a Timex watch that spits out PWX files then you'll be close to soiling yourself with delight at the news that you can now import them directly into Fetch. You can find a link on the main Train page, or if you'd like it on a plate, here's a direct link to import a PWX file.

Finally, for two of the nicest people I know, I'd like to ask a favour of you all - go check out Forces Festival, Forces March, and Project 65. Noel and Sylvia Jones (aka Nightjar and Silvershadow) have been fundraising for these guys in all sorts of entertaining and inventive ways, and if anyone deserves a commemorative pint glass and a day off, it's them.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Oink.

This week marks the anniversary of a very important date for me. Four years ago, Fetch ceased to be something I spent a few hours working on each evening just for fun, and became something I spent most of my day on. If you want to know how it all came about, try A Brief History of Fetch.

I remember the early days of full-time work on the site. Coming from a job where running was something that had to be done whilst simultaneously eating my lunchtime sandwich, I remember feeling extremely guilty about the idea of going for a daytime run. But I've come to realise that dedicating some time to running IS part of my job. In fact, it's one of the most important parts. I have a duty to know what it feels like to train for a race, how it feels when you can't be bothered, and exactly how it feels to sprint straight to the loo after a run, only to discover that your Garmin is within range of the computer, and is already broadcasting the details of your run to random strangers on the internet.

This week I used the survey question to look at the support we get from our friends and family. It's all very well for me to understand what it feels like to be a runner, but the people who really matter are those around you. How many of us can rely on someone to be waiting at the finish line with a bottle of isotonic shandy and an undressed banana, and how many runners have to dodge disapproval before they even run a step?

The good news is that 86% of us have families that approve of our running, and 64% even get some active support At the rather shocking opposite end of the scale, nearly 8 in every 100 runners are up against people who just don't get it at all - people who don't approve, and people who try to discourage. For shame!

If you want to know how that feels, I've made some clouds out of all the responses, with the most popular ones shown in the largest font (unless your email program has eaten my formatting, in which case, I apologise). I can understand most of them, apart from the folks in the "supported" group who feel resigned, disappointed and frustrated about it :-)

Unsupported Runners
accepting ambivalent annoyed apathetic cr*p demoralised disappointed fine frustrated happy indifferent meh not bothered ok pants reasonable resentful resigned sad tolerant unconcerned understandable uninterested unsupported unsupportive whatever

Supported Runners
accepting ambivalent content cool disappointed fine frustrated grateful happy indifferent meh neutral ok relaxed resigned thankful tolerant unconcerned

Of course, for the sake of balance, I should say that for every runner who gets support from their families, there's a family who needs support in return. Just as I need to concentrate on my running, and on my job, I also need to remember to flush the aforementioned loo, and clean it once in a while too. And that's why you're getting this newsletter on Sunday evening, and not on Friday as advertised (although for the benefit of the tape, I'd like it to be noted that I didn't leave it 'til Monday!). I've just had a lovely weekend with my boy, and a nice dinner and a cheesy film with some fantastic people, and as far as important things go, there's nothing to beat it. Look after each other.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Look at the size of that whammer!

For the purposes of getting the whole April Fool's thing out of the way quickly, I would like to point out that there is something behind you, and invite you to quickly check in the direction I am pointing. There, done. Those of you that didn't fall for that will also have noticed that there was no newsletter last Friday, as I took the week off to fill in my census form. I chose Emmental as my favourite cheese, and in the box where it asked you to make a wish, I asked for edible armpit hair.

If you've been to the home page in the last few days, you may well have seen the survey question that I've been putting under people's noses. I've had fun over the last year deriving all sorts of statistics from the training and race information that you folks have submitted to the database - but I thought it would open up some new horizons to invite people to answer a fairly straightforward question each week.

Resisting the temptation to ask the one about where babies come from, I've kicked us off with a simple question about stretching. In hindsight I could have added a few more options, but the gist of it was: "Do you stretch during your warmup, and do you stretch after you've run?", with the options being a fairly restrictive: "never", "sometimes", and "always". Over 2000 of you responded, and less than a hundred spoiled their ballot papers by eating them.

Before I talk about the results, I would just like to say that if you've got a question you'd like to ask, let me know, and I will pick a few in the coming weeks.

So there are those all important pies - and the headline news is that only 12% of you always stretch during warm up, and less than half of you always stretch after running. H'interestingly, women are better at always stretching post run (46% versus 38% amongst men), but more men always stretch during warm up (15% versus 4.7% of women).

I also wanted to see whether higher-mileage runners do less stretching. I gave each runner one point for each "always", half a point for each "sometimes", and no points for a "never". Going quite against the grain of all popular advice, the higher mileage runners do less stretching than their low mileage counterparts. Repeating the exercise to look at whether age plays a factor, I found a slight tendency for older runners to stretch more.

Site news - these days a lot of websites, apps, watches and phones are capable of spitting out GPX files. In a shell-like nut-shaped manner of speaking, these files contain information about where you ran, and with a bit of jiggery-pokery, can be used to work out your splits, calculate your pace, draw your route on a map, act as evidence in a court case, and so on. If you would like to give this a try, check out the Import a GPX page. You can find a link to this page on the main Training section of the site, in a box marked "Add Training". As usual, don't worry if it doesn't work first time. There's every chance that I've wedged a spanner somewhere important.

The new web server is being plumbed in next week - and unless you're awake during the middle of the night, you're unlikely to know anything about it, except hopefully that the site will work a bit faster, and of course everywhere will be soaking wet.

And finally... we've also done a bit of restocking of the Fetch Shop, and I've placed another order today to fill in the sizing / colour gaps. This here is the nice lady who packs your stuff - and I've instructed her to randomly add free chocolate to orders placed in April. Yes, really, but you can make your own tea.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. We also have a secret base in a hollowed-out volcano, but supplying the address is kind of self-defeating - and in any case, your satnav wouldn't recognise the postcode.

I'm pleased to report that my mileage and enthusiasm is back to the sort of levels I was achieving before the clocks went back. I'm much happier when the days are longer and a bit warmer - it's so nice to smell the first grass cuttings of the year, and to start contemplating vests as anything other than an undergarment.

I thought I'd talk about running clubs this week. I'm claiming club seekers allowance at the moment - my schedule and priorities make it pretty much impossible to get to a suitable club night, and I'm not even racing enough to justify joining FERC just for the purposes of getting cheaper race entries and a free set of steak knives. But whatever my circumstances, I would heartily recommend club membership to everyone, preferably your local one. These days, with regular parkruns and online community activity, the boundaries between solo and group running are a little blurred, but it can hugely improve your knowledge, motivation, and enjoyment of the sport to find a group of local people who share your love / hatred of running.

I've heard plenty of people say that their local club seem intimidating or unwelcoming towards new runners - but I also know plenty of clubs who do all they can to make sure that new runners, slower runners, nervous runners (anything with a 'runners' in the name, except possibly gun runners) are catered for. Try the Clubs page to find one near you. Let me know if you have any bad experiences, and I'll personally infiltrate their changing rooms with a hidden camera and a huge false beard.

I looked at the annual mileage of several thousand regular runners, to find out if club members did anything differently. 55% of the sample were club runners, 45% listed as unattached. The difference is quite large - typical club runners put in 880 miles per year, unattached runners do just 481. Club runners are also more consistent - their mileage per month varies a little less (a standard deviation of 3.3% compared to 4.5% amongst unattached), and they have fewer months in the year where they record no mileage at all (0.99 per club runner, compared with 1.75 per unattached runner).

You may already know that there's quite a strong relationship between mileage and race performances (see the Half Marathon Graphathon newsletter for an example), but does the extra mileage and consistency of club running translate into a nice big chunk off your PB? I looked at the best times of over 5000 marathon runners, and came up with the following graph, which shows the number of runners in each ten minute pace group (adjusted for the fact that the club runners group was slightly larger):

Overall, the marathon times of club runners were about 20 earth minutes faster. There were 179 club runners in the 2:50-3:00 group, compared with 63 unattached - almost three times as many. The majority flips around at about 3hrs40 - and I wonder if this represents the point at which people start feeling discouraged / too slow to join in with their local clubs. But as I hope you can see, there are plenty of club runners on the slower end of the scale, so don't be afraid. Do it now.

I have no site news to report this week... but it's hard not to see the real world news about Japan without feeling very sad - it brings home just how delicately all our lives are balanced. I've had several people ask me to mention runforjapan.com - a chance for you to donate some money to the British Red Cross by dedicating one of your runs. And even if you can't spare a little bit of money, do something for someone today. We're all in the same club.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. My gosh, it's the Fibonacci sequence!

For the first time this year, I'm actually ahead of the game. Friday's wonderful exposé into alternative races by McGoohan means that I've got five days rather than minus three days to put together this weeks newsletter. Of course, I only got as far as writing those first two sentences, and now it's Sunday night, and the pressure is right back on. If you'd like to contribute by writing a newsletter, join this group. But at times like these, I remember my literary heroes - Jessica Fletcher, Doogie Howser MD, and of course Stephen J. Cannell for that bit he did at the end of every episode of The A-Team.

This week, I thought I'd talk about how to measure success, which sounds very much like it's going to be a boardroom presentation where I use lots of acronyms, and we all congratulate ourselves on being earmarked for the board, and so forth. But it isn't. And I will also try to prevent it from involving too much statistical speak, a goal that is helped by the fact that I don't *really* know what I'm talking about.

For the sake of making this a weekly newsletter and not a thesis, I'm going to define success as improving your race times. I know that it's more to do with having fun, spending quality time with your loved ones, and regular bowel movements - but I don't fancy my chances of making a graph of that somehow.

I'd like to find a way of measuring an improvement that rewards fast and slow runners in a fair way. Here's an example to think about: If you can run a 10k in 50 minutes, you might be delighted to take a minute off your PB, but how does this compare to a 60-minute runner taking two minutes off their time? Slower runners will always have the advantage if you just use time gained, and even if you calculate the percentage improvement, the outcome seems unfair (is two minutes off an hour as good as one minute off thirty?). The problem is that the closer you get to the limits of human performance, the harder it becomes to improve. Just ask Tyson Gay.

The best method I have come up with is based on the idea of rarity. Pretty much everyone who runs can complete a 10k in under 90 minutes, and nearly no-one can complete one in under half an hour. This lovely curve (I think it's called a sigmoid, but that could also be the name of the latest Doctor Who villain) shows the percentage of runners capable of running a particular time:

So for example, only 40% of runners can complete a 10k in 45 mins or less, 60% can get a sub-50, and so on. Invert the values in this graph, and you get a measure of the rarity of different performances.

Only about one in five runners go sub-40, one in twenty go sub-36, etc. Measuring improvement becomes as straightforward as measuring the increase in rarity of the performance. In the example I gave you earlier (have you been listening, or just skimming for my awful jokes?), the 50-minute runner who takes a minute off their time scores 0.112 rarity points, and the 60-minute runner who takes two minutes off scores 0.05 rarity points. According to my system, the 60-minute runner would have to reduce their time by just under 4 minutes to score the same amount.

If you're the sort of adventurous person who likes to try new things, like balsamic vinegar, then I've built a little prototype so you can enter some times and see what they score. I'd be delighted to hear what you think of this system, and if there's one way to ensure a healthy supply of comments and advice, it's to pump out some outrageous claims about a wonderful new system, and wait for the objections to roll in! I suppose the final question to answer is Why? Well... mainly just to keep you entertained between runs, but also to give hope to us runners who will never feature in the medals table.

Site news -you may have noticed that the site has been chugging along at times in the last week or so. Mostly this is down to my poor coding skills, creating new features that don't operate very efficiently - but another factor is that the web server Fetch lives on was commissioned in 2007, and that's a long time ago on the Internet. So in two weeks we move into the digital age, leaving behind our current server (a cardboard box, painted silver, full of highly-trained woodlice and a barley sugar distribution system to keep them motivated), and onto a wonderful-sounding quad core processor, with 4Gb of RAM, three hard drives, and a swarm of angry and highly ambitious bees who will sting their own bee-grannies to bring you your data. Hopefully, this will all happen when you're asleep. Don't have nightmares.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I may be slow, but I corner well.

I'm taking a break this week, but I've shone a big M into the sky over Fetcham City, and McGoohan has come to my rescue. See ya! Fetch

If you log training on Fetcheveryone regularly, you'll know that there are several different types of running you can log. From the vaguely-named General, to the sinister sounding Brick, from the easy sounding Warm-Up to the 'that sounds like hard-work' of Carrying Weight. Most of us will have tried Intervals at some point. Some - the crazy ones - will even love them. But how many have tried Dog Running? In the interests of trying out the full Fetch table d'hote, I have. Using a hire dog from Hertz Dog Rentals and attached to it by a length of elastic I was dragged around a Parkrun at what felt like the speed of light but which was probably only the speed of sound.

Over the months, years and millennia, Fetch has been inundated with requests such as 'You have 'Intervals' as a training category. So why haven't you got 'Running Wearing A Trilby'?' Quite often he has obliged. Which is why we have 'Running While Singing' and 'Running A Bath'. Occasionally he has to decline them which is why we don't have 'Running For The Bus', 'Running Into A Stiff Breeze' or 'Run For The Sun, Little One, You're An Outlaw Once Again.'

I have such a short attention span and even smaller boredom threshold that I often fall asleep on my runs. You know the ones I mean; you probably have similar ones: the 'standard three mile loop' or the 'five miles to the sewage works and back'. The ones you've run so often you could do them in your sleep. You know every pothole, every raised manhole cover and the dodgy bit of kerb that you never seem to avoid and that sends water up your leg. This is why I long for something different. A new way to run. A newplace to run. A new trilby to run in. If you feel the same, worry no more, because I've done the research for you and I've found new ways to run that are so Out There you can't even log them. Yet.

Read the list below, pick your favourite and campaign now to get it included in the Training options in its own right.

Running While Following A Cheese
There is always some gimmick event going on somewhere: Wife Carrying/Cheese Rolling/Dog Vacuuming. The Cotswold Cheese Rolling Race at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire is very popular. It got cancelled last year due to safety concerns but bless em there was an unofficial one instead. I have been to Cooper's Hill and while I was relatively unconcerned about the steepness or unevenness of the slope, I was slightly more concerned with the breezeblock wall a metre beyond the bottom of the hill. If you like to hurtle down a steep slope into what the building industry calls 'a light concrete building block made with cinder aggregate' then watch this space to see if it's going ahead this May Bank Holiday.

Running While Carrying A Wife
Definitely going ahead and this very weekend, there's a wife-carrying contest in Dorking (6 March 2011) but the organisers are very clear about this: the wife can be of either sex, the participants don't have to be married - or in a civil partnership - and the goodladywife can carry her goodgentlemanhusband instead if she likes. Everyone has to wear a crash helmet though including the man in the beer tent. Health and Safety and all that.

Running Faster Than Anyone Else, Ever
Once you've done vacuuming the dog would you like to break the world mile record? You can't? Sure you can. We just need to revive the Meltham Maniac Mile. The record for this race is 3 mins 24 seconds. The world record for the mile is currently 3 mins 43 seconds and a few smidgeons. The secret to the Meltham Mile was that it was entirely downhill, dropping 400 feet from start to finish. Though the race is now defunct, nothing but common sense and self preservation can stop you from going there and giving it a try. Find the route as follows: Six miles South West of Huddersfield, on the B6108. It's a one-mile stretch from the cattle grid on the moor above Meltham to the Popley Butts sign. And remember you need dedication, dedication, dedication, that's what you need, if you want to be a record breaker, yeah.

Running backwards
I saw the former boxer Chris Eubank doing this through the streets of Brighton. He was going pretty fast for someone not looking where they were going and he gave cheery waves to the locals and tourists alike. They were divided, I'd say, about fifty-fifty between "Yay! Good old Chris!" and - I'm paraphrasing here - "I may be waving to you Mr Eubank, but I am choosing to wave with only a few of my fingers. In this manner, you may perceive that I am disrespecting you."

But could you run any distance backwards? Not just a few yards in a warmup. What about 1km? A mile? How about 3km? Now's your chance. You could take part in the First UK Running Backwards Championships at Crystal Palace in July. Failing that in a wonderfully Ignoring-The-Point-About-This-Sort-Of-Thing-Supposedly-Being-Annual kind of way, the Second UK Running Backwards Championships are a month later in Heaton Park, Manchester. Oh and by the way, the course record backwards mile for men is 7:30. For women it's a very beatable looking 12:40. ot tnaw uoy wonk uoy no oG.

Running blindfold As a non-running For Instance, I've had ski lessons where the instructor thought we should be a bit like Luke Skywalker being trained by Yoda in that bit where he has to sense his target with his mind rather than with his eyes. As I recall, Luke got lasered on the backside quite a few times before he was able to save the galaxy and kiss his sister. Thus blindfolded, we attempted to zig-zag down what felt like the Cresta run. Those of us who survived became really quite accomplished skiers.

But a running event? Well, no. Not really. But there are some who always, effectively, run blindfold: blind runners. If you have the time and inclination, sighted guides who can assist blind or partially-sighted runners always come in useful and are sought out here. If you are interested in blind sport in general, here's the site you need.

Running barefoot
While you're logging your training, you can also record the footwear you ran in. From your ASICS Gel Cumulo-Nimbo Boutros-Boutros Ghalis to your Adidas Run DMCs. But you can also select 'barefoot'. I find that one quite useful when I want to log some swimming. The Boutros-Boutros Ghalis tend to weigh me down otherwise.

What about running barefoot as something to try? Just try heel striking when barefoot. Won't do that again will you? There is a whole debate on the pros and cons of barefoot running with websites set up in opposing camps. The whole thing has become somewhat argumentative. I know: an internet discussion becoming all heated and vitriolic? That's a first.

Running naked
Reverse of the above really. Instead of taking off your running shoes and leaving your vest and shorts on, you leave your vice on and take your versa off. Now, I'm not talking about the recurring dream we all have. The one where you're late arriving for the London Marathon and when you get there you realise that you've forgotten your number, your iPod and your shorts. So you run the whole thing holding onto the bottom of your vest and trying to pull it down lower to save your dignity. That's not just me, right?

In the 1970s when nakedness was invented, 'Streaking' meant something different. Rather than the current Fetch meaning of 'Running Every Day' it usually involved invading the Second Test at Lords dressed only in a feather boa with 'George Davies is Innocent' written in lipstick across your bottom. Time has moved on. Streakers no longer bother with the boa these days and rather than a political slogan usually have 'Golf Sale' written on their buttocks.

If you are interested in this type of streaking you could take part in a 5K wearing nothing but a smile and a pair of Mudclaws by entering this race. There are very few naturist races in the UK but there are loads of them in the US and Australia. To be honest, some of those websites were a bit disturbing and I had to go and sit in a corner for a little while and compose myself before I could finish typing this. There are also naked cycle rides so you could combine the two into some sort of naked duathlon. I'm not giving you any links to these though: I just saw a picture of a naked unicyclist that will live with me to the grave.

Hope there's enough there to keep you all occupied. Just remember, if you see someone running backwards, naked except for a trilby, give them a wave. It won't be me. It's just polite.

Happy Running,
McGoohan

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Two newsletters in a week - you lucky people. Seriously though, it's hard work keeping up - if you'd like to contribute, join this group

I get dozens of automatic emails from you folks every time I send out a newsletter. The world of "Out of Office" makes for interesting reading. I get to see who's gone on holiday, who's off work (I should compare that against your mileage one of these days, I could make a fortune in back handers), and who I should contact in your absence (please make sure they are au fait with your training schedule).

Last week I got a bunch of rejections from spam filters because I'd used the word 'n*pples' when describing the hardships of running a marathon. So it is with some trepidation that I inform you that this week I want to talk about streaking. In most sports, it can get you on the telly, and rugby tackled by one of your sporting heroes, but for some runners, it's an everyday occurrence (groan). A 'streak' in running is the name given to a period of time when you run every single day. Ron Hill is undoubtedly the most famous running streaker, having run at least a mile every day since December 1964, despite broken bones, surgery, and all that time he spends making running kit. The longest recorded streak on Fetch comes from Plodding Hippo who has run every day since April 1st 2006.

It's highly debatable whether a daily run is good for you, because it cuts down on the amount of time your body has to recover, and increases the amount of washing you have to do, unless of course you don't wash your kit, in which case it reduces the amount of people who want to go running with you. Either way, if it's something you're interested in doing, you should build up gently, to give your body chance to adapt.

I've noticed that groups of you like to attempt month-long streaks (June-athon, December-thon, Fetch-athon, and-so-on), and all manner of spreadsheets and lists cropping up to log these attempts. And whenever I see a spreadsheet, I'm always transported back to the time when I used to log my training in one, and how it spawned the idea for the website. So I thought it would be great to build the facilities for you to streak in comfort, and so Thingy-thon was born!

It's pretty simple. Once you've registered, all you have to do is log your training as normal, and then check the monthly table to find out how you're doing. Running, swimming, biking and cross-training all count. The days on which you've exercised will change colour depending on the type of training you did. If you do more than one sport, you get our jazzy-looking triathlon icon. Each day that you train earns you a point, no matter how far or how fast you train. Consider this a gentle introduction to streaking - you can miss a day, and still stay on the leaderboard. Running should be fun as well as challenging.

Of course, the question most of you are probably asking is 'Why would anyone want to do this?' Would you ask the same of Christopher Columbus? Phileas Fogg? Kerry Katona? The simple answer is that there are boundaries out there just waiting to be pushed, records waiting to be broken, and the definition of entertainment just begging to be stretched.

And that's me done for another week - it's time to crawl back into my pit. In an attempt to bring the newsletter back to its more regular Friday slot, I've asked McGoohan to fire up his Newslettertron 3000, so that I get a bit of a break to catch up, and you get two newsletters for the price of one this week.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. It's where I had my first pizza. Other things too, of course, but it's the pizza that stands out.

The magical power of half term has produced two interesting effects this week. Firstly, this newsletter is much later than usual, and secondly, I seem to have been watching a lot of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. Actually, I think those two effects should be the other way round, and one should be called a "cause" rather than an effect. It would seem that in order to perform myth busting experiments, you need glasses and interesting facial hair. Discuss.

In the spirit of Mythbusters, I thought I'd investigate one that you often hear when discussing marathon training - namely that when you return to shorter distances after completing your marathon, you get lots of PB's.

I started by finding all the marathon runners in the database who had a previously existing PB at 5k, 5 miles, 10k, 10 miles and half marathon. I filtered again, like some sort of polyester prospector, to find the ones who had run the same distance again in the three months post marathon. Would these 7153 marathon runners all score fantastic bests? Or would all the long slow distance runs have removed all hare-like tendencies from their legs?

The overall statistics are encouraging. Out of 7153 runners, 47% of them improved at least one of their PB's, and 13% picked up two. Here's how it breaks down:

10k seems to be the most popular distance to race at following a marathon, and it's the shortest races that bring in the highest yield. Excuse me if I sound like Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses, but I remember after my last marathon in 2008, that the long drawn out pain of four hours of running felt like good preparation for surviving the sharper pain of a shorter race.

The closer you get to becoming the world record holder at anything, the harder it gets to improve (unless it's the world record for stuffing marshmallows into your mouth - which eventually reaches a point where you are more sugar than human, and at that point, anything becomes possible). In other words, if you've only run one 10k before, then do a marathon, then come back to 10k, it's pretty clear you'll be stronger and better prepared for it.

Let's see if we can measure that by factoring in a measure of experience. If someone has run a distance once before, and they beat their time post-marathon, they go in our 1 point group. If someone has run a distance ten times, and they go on to beat it, they go in our 10 point group. Do we see the effect of a marathon more strongly for beginner runners? Here's a very sunshiney graph:

For example, if you've done just one 5k, and you do another one after your marathon, there's a 62% chance you'll beat your best time. However, if you've run five of them, that likelihood falls to 36%, and by the time you're on your tenth, that number falls to 18%. People improve with experience in any case - take a look at how quickly your 5k time improves. And of course we can talk about the marathon effect wearing off, but by the time you've run that many races, it won't be the only thing that's worn off. Next week: nipple care as part of a busy lifestyle.

Site news - I've started work on an API. It's a way for other computer programs to talk directly to the Fetch database. If you think the graphs above are geeky, this isn't the paragraph you're looking for *does Jedi wave*. But the end result will mean that Fetch will be connectable with all sorts of other running websites and utilities, and it sets us on a path towards being able to have decent apps for iPhone, Android, and all the others. Heck, you could even install Fetch on a toaster. Once again, I need help (and here's the unbearably nerdy bit) - I am in the middle of building an authentication mechanism - so if you've got any experience in building an OAuth service provider, I would love to hear from you on the API thread. There, that wasn't too bad.

Thanks to everyone who responded to last week's call for suggestions for my objectives in 2011 - I got some useful stuff, and as I put this together into some sort of plan to present to The Man, I will be writing some individual thank you notes. If you've got any big thoughts about the site that you'd like to share with me, please get in touch.

Right then - it's time to go find out whether an aeroplane can take off on a treadmill.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails I send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Your call may be recorded, and done as a cover version by the Bay City Rollers.

I'm sitting on the sofa in the kitchen, watching the birds in a nearby tree as they hop about on the branches in the sun. There's a small dog watching my every move (she wants my seat), and a larger one sleeping on my right foot. There's no office full of people, with whiteboards, shoulder pads, a stationery cupboard, and no big boss at a huge oak desk, who smokes too many cigars, and crushes plastic cups in his fist at the merest hint of bad news, before reaching into his desk draw for his medication, and instructing me to "bring him answers, not problems". There are never any of those things - just you folks, on the other end of the string with glorified yoghurt pots that I like to call The Internet. And I need your help - but more on that in a bit.

This week I'd like to show you an update to your training log that I'm really quite pleased with. Each entry in your log now has a little pair of glasses next to it. Click them, and you'll find yourself in a magical land of analysis, full of tables, graphs, maps and other dissections of your run, so you can analyse your performance until even you are fed up of hearing about it. Here's a screenshot from a run I did a few days ago:

To give you some control over the amount of data-tritus, you can also close down the individual panels in this display - just click the X at the top of a panel to minimise it - so for example if you never bother with heart rate data, you can switch that panel off. Look out for more panels appearing in the coming weeks (suggestions always welcome), as well as options for sharing this data with other Fetchies and with the wider world. But for now, this view is just available to you.

Anyway... back to my request for help. Despite my opening paragraph, I do actually have a boss, actually a very nice one, who generally leaves me to my own devices, and has a fantastic new beard / blouse / haircut / has lost weight / is very generous / is kind to animals. And it's that time of year when I've got to make some suggestions for objectives for the forthcoming twelve months. I have to confess that I don't exactly navigate to a plan. More often than not, an idea will present itself to me on a particular day, and I will write code like a manic octopus until it just about works - at which point I will let you guys play with it, and help me knock off the rough edges, or else I scrape it quietly in to the bin, and wander away whistling.

This doesn't seem like a particularly robust way of working, but it does seem to be keeping you all entertained and attracting more of you. For graph lovers, this one shows the number of unique visitors to the site each month. The blue line is 2009, the red line is 2010, and the green dot is January of this year - our record month so far. The sharper tacks amongst you will notice that we get more visitors than there are registered users - but that's because people often browse without registering. The headline stat is that we have about 40% more people Fetching than we did twelve months ago. Hello Everyone!

So for the purposes of being a bit more grown up and structured, I thought it would be good to ask you folks for your suggestions and thoughts on what I can focus on in 2011, and how I can ensure the site is a success. On one level, this could be as simple as telling me which features you'd like to see. But I'd also appreciate your thoughts on bigger questions - for example: how do I make the community bigger without losing touch with its nature? How should the sales guys talk to potential advertisers about the site, and how should the site fund itself and reward the investment that Natmag Rodale have made in it? What is the key to the success of the site? Where's that funny smell coming from? Please let me know by reply to this email, or send feedback - I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional before doing anything at all. The value of your stuff can go up or down or in some cases, sideways.

Last January, Martine McCutcheon was on the telly promising me some Tummy Loving Care, and I spent weeks waiting in, in case she turned up at my house with a sack full of yoghurt and a big spoon. The harsh un-yoghurty reality is that the promises we pile up at New Year are down to us to keep - but the good news is that the start of February is a good if not better time to create and renew your goals. All the folks who didn't really mean it have faded away, the gym is quieter, and you can probably pick up some "New Year, New You" stuff on the cheap from Tesco.

If you're a new runner this year, you're probably starting to notice that one of the first things people ask you is whether you're training for the London Marathon. If you're a more seasoned runner, you probably get quite antsy when people refer to it as "The" marathon. If you've spent the last four years working Wednesday to Saturday at the pre-race exhibition (that'll be me then), you'll probably be quite glad to be having the year off this time round. But if you're running it, you'll find it's a thrilling experience to be part of the biggest race in the UK, and if you're anything like me, you'll be high-fiving, whooping, and choking on your own emotions as you make your way round. So for all you marathoners, whether it be "The" marathon, or one of the dozens of other races of 26.2 miles around the UK this year, here are some useful numbernuggets I've pulled out of the database to make sure you don't snap yourself in half before the big day.

This graph shows the average weekly mileage that runners achieve in the 16 weeks before a marathon. For example, a four hour marathon runner will average 30 miles a week. They all start lower of course, and peak higher, but it gives you an idea of commitment. Remember, good training is not just about mileage - faster runners tend to have a more intense, structured and consistent training plan, and most importantly, they look after their bodies. Just to give a bit more colour to the picture, here's the peak mileage week graph:

Most people are a month into their marathon training plans now, and it's a good time to learn about recovery weeks. You might be feeling like Superman after four or five weeks of training, but be smart and know when to give your body a rest. Using the average figures above, I counted up the number of occasions when runners took an easy week.

For example, our four hour runner will have five weeks where his weekly mileage is 10% or more below average, four weeks where weekly mileage is 20% or more below average, and so on. It looks like faster runners don't take it quite so easy, but the point is that they ALL take it a bit easy sometimes. The scale is perhaps easier to understand when you translate it into a table like this, which shows some typical mileages for these lighter weeks:

So in hitting his 30 mile weekly average, our four hour runner will also run 27, 24, 21, 15 and 9 mile weeks. Of course, some of these light mileage weeks will be part of the taper, but you should make sure the rest of your plan includes some easy time.

Site News - I did my longest run of the year so far yesterday, all in the name of reaching the point where the A4147 crosses the M1, just so I could Conquercise four new zones. There are some updates to report - in the Zone Browser, you can now choose a "Home" zone to centre your maps on; the Unconquered Zones map is now draggable, to help you see what's available in other parts of the country; and if you've run overseas, the system will automatically add the relevant zones for you. I'm writing this in the Costa at Tottenham Hale, planning a daring raid on Walthamstow, just as soon as my tuna melt goes down. I'd love to hear how Conquercise has affected your running - has it helped to make the miles a bit more fun and encouraged you to find new places, or are you reading this from the bushes outside your house, tripping up rival runners with a comedy walking stick? Let me know.

And finally, I'd like to say thank you to the lady from Gore who sent me this fantastic pair of gloves. Like a lot of people who suffer from Raynauds, my hands get face-twistingly sore and white-fingered when it's cold outside - but these gloves have done a great job of protecting my pinkies so far - I almost want it to get colder to see what they are capable of. On an unrelated note, did I ever mention that my current bike is not very good, and that I've run out of Marmite? But seriously, I do really like the gloves.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Don't drink the tap water, they have done something to it.

According to Katieb, I am about six out of ten normal. I've settled for this, and asked to be shot if I ever reach ten. Of course, being approximately half way along any scale is probably quite normal, which means it's impossible to show any of this on a graph without a pair of scissors, glue, and a bolt of lightning. Better a six than a five I say - those poor suckers don't know what they want.

Two weeks ago, I described ultra runners as Ultranutters, a name which raised one or two eyebrows, and some interesting points. My intention was not to suggest that ultra runners are one gel short of a refuelling strategy, but actually that their achievements are so amazing that they almost defy belief. But the folks I spoke to were of the opinion that the nuttiness was not in ultra running itself, moreso in a proportion of people who choose to do them, on the back of insufficient training. And following on from this, there was a suggestion that sites like Fetch encourage people to take on these challenges when perhaps they should not.

Unfortunately this is probably true in some cases, and a common behaviour in any group. If Fetch were a knitting circle, some of us would feel under pressure to make longer and longer scarves, and would end up with RSI, or suffer a terrible impalement from overknitting and consequent clumsiness. Now there's a sport that would benefit from a safety hat if ever I saw one.

The point is that we measure ourselves by the people around us, and we find role models that make life look simple - and it's all too easy to want to be like them. When you surround yourself with runners, you begin to see what they do as normal. And without a good understanding of the efforts that go into achieving these things, it's all too easy to find yourself on the bus home with one leg hanging off.

So if you're caught in this particular tractor beam, let me see if I can be the statistical equivalent of Obi Wan Kenobi, and help you reach the safety of normality. *makes sound of tractor beam powering down. Beeeeeeeeeeew*

The Office for National Statistics have discovered that the most popular pastime for 85% of the people in the UK is watching telly. So if running is what you concentrate on the most, you're already in the top 15% of people, in terms of getting-off-your-bum-and-doing-something. Only 51% of people listed exercise as a pastime, which must make you all the more special. You really are quite unique, you know. They go on to look at the sporting activities of those who have managed to crowbar their backsides off the sofa - and only 8% of men and 5% of women have listed running. Compare this to a weighty 12% of men who list snooker, and 5% who list darts as their method of keeping fit, and you hopefully start to see that getting out for a few runs each week puts you into a pretty strong position. In fact, the average person exercises twice a week, for 25 minutes at a time, and there are literally thousands of you who have already busted your way past that. By the way, I would hate to discourage any snooker players out there into giving up and returning to their sofas. It's a gateway sport - I think Terry Griffiths melted a pedometer once.

I hope that goes some way to reminding you all that by showing a commitment to running, you already doing a great job of looking after yourselves. But how about the second part of the problem. Does Fetch encourage people to compete in more extreme events? I'm going to go with a safe yes, and suggest that you all go and put your feet up in front of the telly and eat some cake - or at the very least, use the forum to get some good advice from people who have done these things before, AND CRUCIALLY, listen to the advice. But it would be cruel not to treat you all to an interesting graph - which shows which distances have been in favour over the last five years. I showed in my Ultranutters newsletter that ultra running was a minority - but is it growing?

The answer is yes - albeit slowly. I would love to think that part of this effect is down to the growing reputation of the site as a serious tool for runners to log, analyse and discuss their training (but I've just made a joke about Terry Griffiths, so I'm on shaky ground). There are also undoubtedly more ultra events to enter these days as the sport grows. The biggest growth is in 5k racing, which is undoubtedly down to the parkrun effect - they may have taken a small share of the 10k market, but more than that, I think they've been responsible for declining snooker standards, which can only be a good thing for the nations fitness.

Site news - and I'm pleased to report that Conquercise seems to have been a big success. Between us, we've conquered 25,892 zones across the UK, which is roughly equivalent to about 18,000 square miles of the country mapped out by your busy feet. If you've already started exploring zones, check out the new Unconquered Zones feature, which shows you a hundred places near you that you could conquer. One of the zones near me goes straight through East Midlands airport - please don't get arrested or squashed kids. Once I've got this newsletter out, I'll be adding in some overseas areas - thanks for your patience.

It's also looking highly likely that we have a venue for the Friends Of Mick'n'Phil Half Marathon. JJ Flash has been working hard to get us back to Draycote Water, sometime in late Autumn. Stay tuned for more updates - same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.

And finally... they must be feeling our love, because Kilomathon London are once again our advertiser and sponsor for this week's verbal sewage. So if you'd like to show your appreciation for the metric system and for people who help keep this site running, please click the following advert. They've promised to buy me a doughnut if enough of you visit their website, and I'm willing to share it.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I'm so sorry to those of you who missed out on this bit down here last week. The pressure to be twice as funny this week though, is too much. I will try my best though, with a joke from my boy. What would you call Batman if he got run over by a steam roller? A Batman cookie. He's here all week. Try the fish fingers.

This week I would like to tell you about a new feature on the site that I'm quite excited about. I'm just back from a very cold run, during which I saw at least twenty rabbi's, a wonderfully muddy game of rugby, a father and little girl reunited, played a game of chicken with two cheery cyclists, and I had a wee somewhere I'd never had a wee before - and most importantly, I enjoyed it all. And none of it would have happened without the little push that this new game gave me. Probably.

I was nosing around the site a few weeks back, and came across a link to a blog site run by Fetchie Discovery Dave. He talks about the enjoyment he gets from asking "Where does that path go?" - the ability to explore new directions, new locations - with nothing but your own power to get you there. Inspired by this, I've carved the UK up into very small bits (think mile-sized squares) that I like to call "zones", and given you the tools to record your exploration, and to share this information with others. And I've called it Conquercise. It's got nothing to do with the size of your conkers, and everything to do with exploring and conquering the world around you through the power of exercise. It's a bit of a rubbish name, but this time next year they'll be saying it on Byker Grove and everything. There are two ways to play:

Explore The World
If you're an adventurous type, you can try to explore more zones than anyone else. As I write this, the current king of the explorers is ogee, with 596 zones. I guess it helps if you're an ultra runner, but a bit of careful route planning can see you pick up four zones in the space of a few hundred metres. Revitalise your long runs by aiming to reach new territory, try a lunch time run from work, and don't forget to visit all those long lost relatives who you'd otherwise avoid. Tell them Conquercise sent you. Then run quickly, before they imprison you for all your fancy talk.

Conquer The World
If you prefer sticking to well-trodden paths, or if you've got control issues, you can make owning a zone your goal. Every time you run, you get a point for each zone you visit - and the person with the most visits to a zone is officially the bestest person in the world, and everyone in that zone will doff their caps as you pass through, make you free cake, and cheerily allow you to harvest their organs for your own personal use. You also gain the right to rename the zone to whatever you like, so if you've always thought that 'London' was a bit of a stupid name, you know what you need to do.

How To Play
To register to play Conquercise, click here.
Once you've done that, Conquercise will scamper through your training log like an invisible squirrel, gathering all your old runs, and building up a list of the zones you've visited (NB it can take a while if there's a queue, so be patient). All you need to do from then on is log your training in the usual way, making sure each run / bike has a route associated with it. If you use a Garmin, this is taken care of when you choose the "Detail" option when importing. If you don't, just map your routes using our route mapper, and when you add a training run, tell it which route you ran, and Conquercise will take care of the rest.

Other Stuff
Are you from one of those other countries I keep hearing about on the tellybox? That's ok. To help keep the size of the database reasonable, I've only sliced and diced a rectangle the size of the UK, but if you'd like me to add another area, get in touch, and we'll talk co-ordinates. I've added part of Belgium for Maclennane already. And because the UK isn't a rectangle, there are lots of zones that are just sea. Short of swimming out towards Ireland in the name of exploration, I need a handy way to trim those out of the database - suggestions appreciated. Whilst I'm at it, remember this is just a game. Don't be running over frozen lakes, or going to the bad part of town, just to hit a zone.

And finally... I'd be delighted if you'd apply your eyes and your clicks to the following advertisement for Kilomathon London. Occasionally I see a grumble about ads - they flash too much, they slow things down, they take up space, and they're for stuff I'd never want - all probably true, to some extent. But these lovely people see our community as somewhere they'd like to connect with, sellers and buyers together. And it's that connection that helps to keep the site in pants and socks, and gives us the freedom to Conquercise. So for everyone's sake, take a look. Thank you.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP.

In what scientists are calling "pretty cruddy", today was officially the most depressing day of the year. It's highly convenient though, as I can pretend I've delayed this newsletter to give you a bit of a cheer up. In reality, I spent most of Friday getting through Angry Birds. If you're having a bad day today, check out the Reasons To Be Cheerful newsletter from a few months ago.

In response to a query from Nightjar I'm going to see if I can dig out a few interesting nibbles on ultra running. Aside from being the perfect event to be sponsored by Always, an ultra refers to any race longer than 26.2 miles, with the exception of the London Marathon, which of course is the longest 26.2 miles ever. One of the difficulties of being part of a running community, is that your perspective of normal is skewed. Suddenly everyone around you has run a marathon, and there are dozens of stories of wonderful ultra running experiences.

To help you get a perspective, as I write this we have had 45,485 people register on the website. When we get to 100,000 we'll have enough people to force a debate in parliament - free laser sharks for runners? Your suggestions please. Of course, lots of the people who arrive on the site don't fully immerse themselves in the Fetch experience, due to differing levels of interest, site usability factors, and restraining orders. But this graph shows you the number of runners who have recorded race times for various distances. As you can see, 10k is the most popular distance, and there are eight times as many marathoners as there are ultra runners.

Out of nearly 200,000 race performances in the database, only around 1% were longer than marathon distance. The longest continuous race performance I could find was the 153 mile Spartathlon, and the longest multi-day race was Run The Moose, 188 miles over six days, both completed by Binks. There's also a wonderful blog about the incredibly daunting Transalpine Run - an eight day 180-mile journey across the Alps - by ATOM. - it's well worth a read, and says more than any statistic.

There's no doubt that running must be a very big part of an ultra runners life, but do they turn in an enormous amount of mileage? I looked at the last four months of training, and runners in the sub-50 mile group ran a typical mileage of about 600 miles. Typical 3:15 marathoners usually run a similar mileage, so it's clear that our ultranutters are pretty dedicated to mileage. Runners of longer races do about 650 miles in the build up, which is not phenomenally more, but it's still about as much as I manage in a year.

And how about long training runs? Sub-3 marathon runners tot up just over a hundred miles in their five longest runs, sub-4's run up about 96 miles, and sub-5's about 90 miles. Typical ultra runners knock out about 135 miles in their five longest runs. And in terms of cross-training, around 10% of ultra runners also swam at least once a week, and 15% biked weekly.

Site news - I'm hoping to use next week's newsletter to tell you about a new training game, that I'm calling Conquercise. I won't give you too many details just yet, because it's still all swirling round my noggin like brain soup - but by giving you this snifter, the hand blender of expectation is now pointed straight at my head, so I will do my best to get the lumps out by Friday.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Unexpected item in the bagging area.

This week, I am returning to a promise I made back in Triathlon 101, August - to look at Triathlon training in a bit more detail. This is entirely coincidental, and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I spent most of yesterday doing an impersonation of a grumbling blancmange, after a seven minute swim (yes you read that right), and a 5k run. The fact that the Bedford Sprint Tri is taking place in May, and I may very well be there wearing an indecent amount of stretch fabric is no more than the wonderful symmetry of nature. Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me.

As real-world triathlon race distances seem to be about as predictable as Australia's Ashes selection policy, I've divided them into two broad groups, to ensure I have enough data.

Filtering out very short events, and anything longer than an Ironman (the latter being more appropriate to a study in mental health), I found nearly five hundred useful cases where the competing athlete had recorded detailed training for the 16 weeks preceding the event. I sorted the performances by time, so I could assess whether there were trends among the faster athletes. In August I discovered that the typical time investment during the triathlon itself is roughly 20% swim, 49% bike and 31% run - but I wanted to look at how much time in training is devoted to these activities, and to try to define a bit of shape for anyone planning to compete in just over four months [coughs loudly].

The graph above shows the typical number of hours per week devoted to training in the 16 weeks before the event. For example, in shorter events (first group of columns), a middle-of-the-road competitor will train for 4.5 hours a week (not including the time taken for polishing your bike, shaving your legs, and hardening up your fudge), and this figure rises to around 6.5 hours a week for longer events. It's interesting to see that the rear third of the field in longer events typically put in more training than those in the front third of shorter events.

This next graph concentrates on shorter events, and shows the percentage of training time devoted to each activity, for those at the front of the field (first pie), mid-field (second pie), and those at the back (third pie). I am currently in the Ginsters category. The front-runners devote far more time to biking than the rest of the field, and an increased emphasis on swimming. It's worth noting that a lot of the triathlon performances in the Fetch database come from runners who are trying their hand at triathlon - but it's clear that a serious attempt at a fast tri involves sacrificing a fair portion of your running time.

For longer events, there was much less difference between the front and rear runners, in terms of the percentage of time they spent on each activity - so I'm just showing you the front of the field. I imagine that this is because there's more of a commitment towards tri as a sport, as compared to the shorter events. The trend towards biking is stronger. In my very limited experience which so far involves: 1) getting wet, 2) complaining for the rest of the day... I can see how biking offers a way to strengthen your legs and cardiovascular bits and bobs, without the weight-bearing impact of running, or the time-consuming and cost-per-session impact of swimming. I tentatively suggest that this chart represents the best training combination.

Having nearly crushed my spirit with my combined swim and run, I thought I'd try to find out how often triathletes record two different sessions in the same day. My transition time between swimming and running involved getting my breath back, drying between my toes, pulling on about 15 layers for the walk back to the house, eating some toast, driving fifteen miles and singing a song about pirate girls - but it still left me feeling like I'd had a battering at the end of the day. This next graph shows the number of double sessions recorded per competitor in the 16 weeks before the event. The good news for me is that it's generally less than one per week.

I'm happy to pass on a tip from a lady I know only as IronKirsty. She suggested that the best way to combat the jelly legs feeling as you switch from bike to run, is to change to a lower gear for the last few minutes of your ride, and increase your cadence. I imagine this has the effect of making running feel like a blessed relief. I will report my findings.

Finally, I looked at all the triathletes in the system, to find out how their best 5k time as part of a triathlon compared to their best 5k time in a solo run. The results varied, but the typical middle of the road person can expect to take about 9% longer to run a 5k as part of a triathlon, as compared to their best ever effort. Quite how much of that is due to all the padding in your shorts is up for debate.

Site news - and I'd like to encourage all of you to join this Fetch Group. We are aiming to organise a race later this year for Mick and Phil Curry. It's predecessor in 2009 raised around £5000 for the lads. It was voted the 7th best race in the UK, and we'd love you to be a part of making this one even more wonderful.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - update your settings to control which emails we send you. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. You are allowed an inflatable sedan chair in your first tri, right?

Judging by the number of "Out of Office" replies I got from the last newsletter, I thought I'd wait and send this when the majority of you are back in work, in the hope that it will be a small smile in dull day. I feel lucky at this time of the year that every newsletter has a ready-made theme, this being the "New Year, New You" one. But do I go with the airbrushed whitened teeth vision of the future, where you all drop a dress size, learn a language, quit smoking, and build a 1:40 scale reproduction of the Bismarck whilst running a sub-3? Or do I tear the whole thing apart, providing statistics that show that five out of every four resolutions fail within the first twenty minutes, and that it's all just a corporate marketing ploy to sell more chewing gum? I think I'll aim somewhere in between, wish you all the best, and suggest that the best resolutions are those that you can live with. Start small, and don't do anything this week that you can't imagine doing every week. It may feel like under-achieving, but you're doing something more important - you're kindling your enthusiasm.

Today I've broken an eighteen day streak of non-running, due to a very busy time around Christmas, so I'm among those who are aiming for a fresh start. Lots of people try to prove themselves at this time of year, whether it's the new runners, attempting to escape the tractor beam of the sofa, spring marathon hopefuls embarking on training plans, or the seasoned campaigners, wearing desperate faces that say "I do this all year round you know".

I found 210 runners who hadn't run a step in December 2009, who ran at least three times in the first seven days of 2010. How many of them would fall by the wayside, and how many would storm their way through January? This graph shows how they fared in the second, third and fourth weeks of January. Bear in mind that they might just have stopped recording their data, or found a better website, or been kidnapped by aliens and yet to return. Imagine the stories they'll tell. I like stories.

For example, in week two (the blue columns), 13% of our New Year hopefuls recorded zero training, and this figure rises to 18% by week four. A further 35% do less than they did in the first week, but they do at least stick at it throughout January. And around 25% of these runners actually do more as the weeks progress. I don't know how this compares to the national average for exercise apathy, but if you log your training on Fetch, your odds of survival are pretty good it seems.

I also looked at the total volume of runners in January, and their mileage as a group. The graph shows the average daily mileage per runner (red line), and a seven day rolling average (blue line). There's a clear preference for running long on Sundays, and the rolling average creeps up from 5 to 5.5 over the month. This data is probably heavily influenced by the folks who are following spring marathon training plans - it would be interesting to split it up. I should say (to avoid future court appearances) that the red line shows an average, but does not represent an average runner, as the picture is also blurred by rest days.

Site news - and there's little to speak of, because I'm busy catching up with all the email that I didn't reply to over Christmas. But if you are trying to lose weight, or overcome a nasty habit, or you've got a mileage target, or a racing target, there are loads of people trying to do the same - check out the Talk section of the website to find plenty of supportive threads. I would also like to thank everyone who made a donation to ASBAH last week - you're completely awesome.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. What's that Flipper? Little Frank is stuck down the old abandoned mineshaft? And you put him there? Bad fish. Naughty fish. Into your bed.

Greetings pop pickers, it's nearly that wonderful day, when the shopping finally comes to an end (except for batteries and tin foil), when you can sit and watch Noel's Christmas Family Accidents, and eat a whole tin of Roses before breakfast and still come back for more; a day when dinner is succulent, opulent and flatulent; when children are living incarnations of the baby Jeebers himself, and don't argue over / break / complain about any of their gifts; when grandparents throw off the shackles of time, win impromptu limbo contests and don't spend the afternoon snoring and scaring everyone with their facial hair and suspiciously mobile teeth; and when, just for once, everyone in the entire world is completely and utterly happy. Even people from other countries.

Of course we all know that Christmas isn't some sort of idealised "Round Robin" letter, although I must point out that little Freddie has hit his first six this year, darling Tabitha has just been selected to ride in the Grand National, and Uncle Steve is off the crack at last. If you choose to let it, Christmas can be the very epicentre of image culture and consumerism; a day so full of expectation, so full of chocolate and sparkle, that anything less than perfection is magnified. If you're already pants-wettingly excited about Christmas (and I hope most of you are), then you don't need me to help you out, so this one's going out to those of you who find the experience just that little bit tough, for whatever reason.

And I thought to myself, this is like running (thank you Rabbi Lionel Blair). You can buy the most expensive kit, watches that tell you what your heart rate looks like from space, magic bracelets that give you the power to leap tall buildings, shoes that actually raise your IQ with every step you take, shirts with built-in endoskeletons that make you look like Daniel Craig, and drinks that help you recover before you've even done anything. You can hit the streets looking like a cyborg, and thrash away, more miles, more races, and more speed. But to do that is not to understand running. Sure it's nice to have a bit of new kit every now and again, and it's nice to get a PB, but the true meaning of running is just to enjoy it, and feel it. Pace and distance are nothing, just as price and quantity mean nothing when it comes to Christmas.

Of course it's not just mindless consumerism that causes the extra pressure at Christmas. It's also a time when people are supposed to be together - it almost feels like it's universal law - and so very difficult when it can't happen. Back in April, I was down in London at the VLM Exhibition, and missing home very much. Mr & Mrs Jigs really made my day - they doubled back through the exhibition to give me a couple of cans of London Pride from their goody bags, and it really struck a chord with me. Family isn't just the people you're related to, being nice to others shouldn't be a once a year thing, and there are little bits of love hiding everywhere you look - I've met some really lovely people through Fetcheveryone, and I feel very lucky. And if you can't see any kindness around you, maybe make some of your own, and pass it on. For example, just type "soup kitchen" and the name of your nearest town or city, and you'll find people in real need of help. Or start even smaller - and say something nice to somebody, even if it's just forgiving me for the writing the softest newsletter ever. If you'd like to go a step further, and you've enjoyed these newsletters, here's a fundraising page for a charity that means a lot to me.

If you're looking for a bit of company on Christmas Day and a simple no-frills run that won't cost a penny, you're in luck. The odds must be about a hundred to one, but Christmas Day falls on a Saturday this year, which is parkrun day. There are dozens of parkruns across the UK, and I'm led to believe that a large proportion of them will be in operation. I'll be at Milton Keynes with my camera, so do come and pull a funny face, and I'll take your picture. Failing that, log on to the website and say hello - I'm sure there'll be people about. Whatever you do, I hope you have a nice time, and a merry Christmas to you all. I'm off to make biscuits now.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. C'mon Santa, let's tango.

This is another one of those very late newsletters, as it's well past 10pm on Friday evening, and I'm nearing the legal alcohol limit for sending out mass email (I'm hoping to finish it and reach the safety of unconsciousness before the cricket starts). Christmas has paid a visit to Fetcheveryone this week, and depending on your point of view, it's either added some light-hearted seasonal sparkle and fun, or it's vomited all over it then tried to chat up its mum. If you're finding it all a bit too jazzy, just scroll to the very bottom of any page on the site, and you can choose a different skin.

This week I'm going to try to pick some highlights from 2010. There was a suggestion that I should include some reflection on users that have left us, the failed attempt at Fetchstock, and other such faded beacons of hope - but I'm holding some material back for the Christmas special. Have you never seen Eastenders?

The Fetch year got off to a flyer in an icy Manchester, with dozens of Fetchies congregating for the BIG Mile. There was a high speed crash in the 60m sprint, and I think you can just about see my elbow in this picture.

Everybody knows that VLM is the longest and hardest marathon in the world, but it can also be the softest and sweetest. Fetchpoint at mile 22 has screamed itself sick at some wonderful passers by, including Hoaxster in his Sonic outfit, and Mick and Phil in 2008, but 2010 saw its first proposal, as Canary Yellow and Kough Kandi decided that hitting the wall is better with company. Danny was unavailable for comment.

By contrast, I don't know quite what's happening in this picture from Edinburgh Marathon Fetchpoint, but they're both adults, and seem to be enjoying themselves, so it's made the cut. Edinburgh is second only to London in terms of the number of Fetchies who come along - and I'm told that Dave doesn't insist on having his abs felt by everyone, and Stumpy is a licensed inspector.

Another event that has become very popular on the Fetch calendar is the Brathay 10 in 10, where a small group of runners complete a marathon every day for ten days, culminating in the popular Windermere Marathon on the last day. Congratulations to Foxy Davy and the others, and good luck to the Fetchies taking part in the 2011 challenge.

A personal highlight for me came at the start of July, with my dad's first ever race at the Aberdare 10k. He took up running a few years ago, and at 63, he's knocked out five hundred miles this year, and picked up a storming time in the race. Thanks mam for the photo.

Then there was the Thunder Run at the end of July, my vote for the most inspiring event of the year, mainly because everyone who did it seems to have had an absolutely fantastic time. I really hope we can send some more teams in 2011.

Legend has it that there was a pub run in August. The people in this image are highly trained athletes, and you should not attempt to recreate any of the poses shown without the aid of some White Lightning, a large bag of peanuts, and a blatant disregard for anything science has taught us.

I was watching the telly in September, and I saw the runners streaming across the screen in the Great North Run, and in the background, a road sign obscured by banners and balloons. "Irresponsible louts" I thought to myself. How quickly my indignation turned to beaming pride when I discovered that it was (in a 'roundabout' sort of way) all my fault. Except the tutu.

We are all well-rehearsed in congratulating achievements by runners, but without the efforts of organisers and marshalls, we'd *all* get squashed, lost, or have a massive fight with nowhere to store our bags. My vote for the best bit of race organisation this year goes to Jen J and Tpod, for the awesomeness that was the inaugral South Downs Way race at the end of September.

Having a baby can have a major impact on your running, unless you tuck it under one arm and pretend it's a rugby ball. But October saw Chromey return from some strenuous 'Cross Training - Giving Birth' in June, to complete the hilly Beachy Head Marathon in a time that can only be described as Nails. Congratulations to her and all the other new mums.(Hi Linford!)

And I really must end it there. I would like to have done so much more, but it's getting very late, and this is in danger of becoming next week's newsletter. There are plenty more highlights on this thread - do feel free to add your own.

Just before I go, I wanted to tell you about the Fetch Christmas Credits competition. If you use the forum, you'll have seen various icons floating round, like the pig, the cake, the chocolate squares, and so on, along with various smileys. Every day from now until the 25th, I'm giving out five "credits" - a bit like Willy Wonka, but without the sugar-fuelled diabetic army of illegal orange immigrants. If you win one, you can upload an icon of your choice to use on the forum. All you've got to do is click here, then make sure you log in each day before midday. The winners are informed by fmail at midday, and you have until exactly midnight to make / borrow / steal an icon to upload. Don't steal one though, that's against the law.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Be somebody, or be somebody's fool.

I'm taking the car into the garage later today to get a new minus sign for my temperature gauge, as the old one seems to have gone out. For the first time in what seems like weeks, there's actually a bit of Celsius about, and my hands and feet are so grateful for it. I asked on Twitter earlier this week for suggestions for a newsletter subject, and most of the replies were about dealing with the snow and ice. So I thought I'd try to put together a few survival tiplets to help you deal with the weather. Of course, the best way to survive it is to stay indoors and fasten yourself to an eggnog drip, but if you're keen to get out, here's how.

As I walked the dog this morning, the local pavements shone with more ice than a diamond smuggler's understairs cupboard, compacted solid by passing feet. The gritted roads might be a bit better, if you can avoid the cars, but your best bet is to go off-road, where the snow is softer and grippier. Expect it to be harder work, as there'll be more give in the surface. It's also much prettier, and I find the acoustics of a blanket of snow make for a strange but enticing arena to gently prance through. If you live a long way from this mythical sporting Narnia, try the opposite approach, and head for the busiest part of town. It might be full of shoppers and suited business types, but the heat given off by their cigarettes and smartphones can often result in an ice-free experience, and you can also pretend you are Franz Klammer as you duck and dive through the crowds.

There's also some really sensible safety stuff you can do, like making sure you've got a phone with you, and carrying ID in case the worst happens, and most importantly, taking your time! I read and hear quite a lot about people who are frustrated about not getting out at this time of year, or that their training has been restricted. This is one of the problems of being part of a running community - it's easy to feel like what you're doing is inadequate. According to a report by the Office of National Statistics, less than a third of people in England do enough exercise - and here you are, beating yourself up because you haven't been out running fifteen times this week. Stay warm and safe. The ice will go soon enough. Have some eggnog.

Site news - and I'm very pleased to tell you about the recently updated Event Finder. I've tried to make it simpler to use, but at the same time, I've added a few extra features to help you get better results. I hope you like the updated look and feel - but please send me some feedback if you hit any problems, or if you think it could work better.

The most important change is that you don't need to use postcodes any more (though you still can) - just enter the name of the place you're interested in, whatever it's called. There's a little cog symbol next to the location box - click this, and it will bring up all the locations you've previously searched on - so if you're like me and your loved ones are spread all over the country, it'll help you plan your visit to Great-Aunt Frogmella to coincide with the local 10k, so she can stand in the cold for an hour holding your coat. There's also an edit button, so you can pick a default location, which will come up every time you visit the Event Finder.

You can also specify any race length, either by choosing one of the standard race distances from the drop-down, or by choosing "Other", you can specify an exact range. And you can choose which days of the week you want to hear about, so if you always play darts on a Thursday, you can make sure you aren't tempted by any Thursday races.

And finally, we're midway into December, and that end-of-term feeling is creeping upon us. As a special treat next Friday, you can bring board games from home, so long as I get to win at Kerplunk. Look out for a little bit of Christmas merriment on the site in this coming week. I'm not sure exactly when, what, or why, but I'm hoping it will be fun. There may be snow, there may be prizes, and maybe even a little *duck*.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Fetchileaks #349: Arnie is actually a clay model, designed by the people that brought you 'Wallace and Gromit'. My old flat in Bristol used to overlook their studios. Fact.

I'm just warming up after a cold morning at Willen Lake in Milton Keynes. I stood around with the other parkrun volunteers, handing out the little plastic numbers, and swearing under my breath to combat the the effects of the temperature on my fingers (by the way, swearing loudly is also a good technique for getting up hills). After warming up in the cafe, it was time to get cold again and get my run done. My car doubles as a bin for empty Coke cans and Ginster's wrappers, but it also holds more secrets than Dumbledore's trouser pockets - and I was delighted to find a bag full of old kit in the back (originally destined for the charity skip), and I wore as much of it as I could without impeding the movement of my arms and legs.

Anyway... now that it's December, it's not just officially Nearly Christmas, but it's also the lowest mileage month in the whole year. If you're like me, you've already switched most of your efforts to improving your chocolate-to-food ratio, to make sure you're ready to tackle the festive period. I thought I'd look at our mileage in the whole of December to find out when the slide really starts. The following graph shows the average daily mileage for us all as a group during December, using figures from 2009.

There's a gradual decline until about the 15th, then things take a bit of a nose dive, but interestingly, the lowest point is the 21st (i.e. the seven days from the 18th to the 24th inclusive), which is also the shortest day of the year. Mileage is already creeping up by the time Christmas day arrives, and continues to rise towards the new year. I can only imagine that this is because most of the week before Christmas is spent frantically buying presents for friends and relatives, and most of the week after is spent doing anything to avoid those same friends and relatives.

The number of runners also dips in a similar fashion, from a typical 1400 per day in the early part of the month, down to around 900 at the solstice, then recovering to above 1400 by New Year's Eve.

I know that there are plenty of people on the site who like to "collect" a full set of PB's at all the standard distances during the year. It's nice to look at your user profile, and see the current year with a list of fat red PB's underneath it. So I wondered whether December saw a mad scramble to achieve this - after all, there are some highly popular races at useful distances, like Bedford and Keyworth half marathons, Ely New Years Eve 10k, Stockport 10 and Luton Marathon. This graph shows the number of PB's in each month of the year:

October is your go-to month if you want to increase your chances of a PB, finely tuned after a wonderful British summer of training, whilst December lags in last place. But if you're revving up for a PB attempt this month, don't be downhearted. The spring and autumn months typically see twice as many race entries as December, so it's no shock they are happy hunting grounds.

That's it for this week - short, sweet, and very late - but I'm sure to be back next week, polluting your inboxes like a chocolate oil rig. Ooh, chocolate. I've got to go.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Order number 587 to your collection point please.

I think David Cameron must be a Fetchie, because he seems to have borrowed the idea of the Fetch Mojometer for his Happiness Index. However, I don't agree that happiness cannot be measured on a spreadsheet, as I'm looking at it right now. Whenever you log a run on Fetch, you can choose your state of mind - anything from "Top Banana" to "Felt Terrible". Ignoring all those annoying people who feel perfect all the time, and lodging my tongue gently in my cheek, I've compiled some snapshot statistics for the honourable gentleman to roll his eyes at. Can I have £2M please?

I scored "Top Banana" as +2, and "Felt Terrible" as -2, and calculated some averages.

This first graph shows that you are best off being born in the sixties, and worst off if you were born in the eighties. If you can't remember running in the sixties, it's a good job that GPS watches weren't invented otherwise you'd probably see a cryptic message from John Lennon when you projected your route onto a map.

Next up, it seems you are more likely to enjoy running if you are a woman - although the figures did show that women were more likely to have a more extreme reaction to a run - love or hate, whilst the blokes exhibited all the emotional range of a grapefruit.

This one is pretty cool actually. It seems that the absolute best time to run, to feel great, is reasonably early. I think that the folks who run super-early have difficult conditions to run in, and are probably trying to fit their running in around very busy lives. There's a little evening peak around 7pm. I'd like to think that this comes from avoiding the trauma of watching Eastenders.

Another pretty interesting one - this one is broken down by month, and shows peaks in April and September. Love them or hate them, the enthusiasm surrounding VLM and GNR does bring a lot of people to running, and reminds them of why they enjoy it.

Now then, this one will take some spin. Ok sure, it looks like we're all getting more and more miserable. But the fact is, all these columns on all these graphs are above the zero mark. In other words, running is still making us happy, whether we're male, female, old, young, whatever. However, if these figures continue, running will be officially bad for you by 2019, so please smile at all the runners you see when you're out.

To summarise, if you want to enjoy your happiest run ever, be female, be born in the sixties, and go for a run one morning in April 2007. I tried that once, it was amazing.

Site news - and I'm pleased to report that Louismaxy, Pestomum and Blunderwoman were lucky enough to scoop the FERC VLM places. Louismaxy is chuffed to be running after years of ballot rejections, Pestomum is about to have a baby, and Blunderwoman may actually be Bella Emberg, so please join me in wishing them all the best. I'm also delighted to say that the FERC committee have decided to divide the money raised from membership between four charities this year, with Help For Heroes, Cancer Research, The British Heart Foundation, and The Centipede Trust each receiving £200. Thank you to all!

I've been playing round with Google's geolocation service, which means that soon you won't have to use postcodes to search the various location-based information on Fetch (like the race listings, clubs, and routes), but you'll be able to type in ordinary place names. I'm also building something that will let you store all your favourite locations, to help you zoom around the maps with ease. More on that soon.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Exit pursued by a bear.

This week I am sitting in Costa (I got in early, and commandeered the squishy sofa), with mizzle in the air outside, contemplating my first run since last Friday, thanks to the near-death experience of man flu. I'm up to my ears in graphs and stats. I could draw you a graph showing the relevant body part that I was up to in graphs, but the act of doing so would affect the figures, and I'd end up stuck in an infinite loop, like BBC Three.

Runner's World (the magazine, not the actual world, which by the way, is quite hilly and smells of trainer cheese and carbo gels) have asked me to produce a shedload of marathon-based graphs for the February issue (which by my calculations is due out at the end of December. Yes, really!) I thought I'd moisten your statpants with a sample. They have so far refused to publish the one that showed the proportion of people who are still aggrieved that Marathon is now called Snickers, but that's a whole other newsletter. Thank you to Quimby for use of that joke.

Over a thousand runners have lovingly recorded their marathon mile splits in the Fetch ZX81, so there's plenty of data to look at. I started by breaking the race down into five mile chunks, to see how runners of different standards tend to pace each section. The following graph shows the pace of each five mile chunk, in relation to average pace for the whole performance. So for example, in the first five miles (dark blue line), a four hour marathon runner will be running about 28s/mile faster than the required 9:09/mile to achieve their goal. In miles 21-25, this pace has typically dropped to 66s/mile slower than the 9:09/mile required.

What you can hopefully see from the graph is that the faster runners are much tighter on their pace. The 2hrs50 group run all their miles within a metronomic 20s envelope, but the 4hrs50 group have mile splits that vary by up to 2.5 minutes. Whilst there are exceptions to the rule, we all start off too fast, and spend the rest of the race hanging on and slowing down. It's quite understandable really - the pent-up adrenaline of months of training finally has an outlet, and there's a good chance you'll see Floella Benjamin if you get a wriggle on. When Haile Gebrselassie ran 2:03:59 in Berlin, his mile splits were all within 4-5 seconds of each other! The rest of us can only dream of his pace, but we can all practice maintaining a consistent pace on longer runs. It might mean a slower start, but if it helps the demoralising crash below your required pace (somewhere in the 16-20 mile zone, according to the graph), then it's worth it.

We've all heard of "The Wall", when the glycogen in your muscles has all but gone, and how it makes you all tired out and so forth [insert more science here]. So I looked in a bit more detail at miles 21 to 26, to see if there was anything interesting on show. This graph shows how the pace in miles 21-22, 23-24, and 25-26 compares to overall race pace.

As a rule, most runners ran all these miles slower than their overall race pace (only about 10% of all the runners I looked at ran a negative split). As I showed in the first graph, the faster runners hold their pace more consistently, but they also slowed consistently, with miles 21-22 around 6s/mile slower than race pace, miles 23-24 around 10s/mile slower than race pace, and miles 25-26 around 18s/mile slower than race pace. Runners who were slower than 3hrs50 actually manage to pull the situation round in the last two miles (where the green line crosses the red). From my own experience, this was the point when emotion took over from tiredness.

That's all for this week - other than a quick plug for the list of ready-made training plans that you can load into your own schedule; and a mention for the new long sleeve and reflective kit available in the Fetch shop. Time for some wine and unconsciousness.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. No tools are left in this newsletter overnight.

Madness! I am sitting in the local soft play, shepherding the boy and his best friend / mortal enemy from next door. I am spent out on mockaccino and kiddie-crack, but so far, so good. I wonder how often these places clean out the ball pit, and whether I will one day find the bones of a severed arm, picked clean, lurking at the bottom, like some macabre bran tub. Anyways... before I forget, I must issue an apology to winter and promise never to claim I am coping well with it ever again. Since I sent the newsletter out last Friday, I have spent the entire time coughing, wincing, croaking and swearing like a wounded pirate. Remember your vitamin C folks, and use a handkerchief. For everything.

As promised on Twitter, I thought I'd have a little look at whether I could identify which parts of your training help most with your racing performances. I looked at runners who had recorded regular training every year from 2006-2009 inclusive, and who had run at least five races during each year. I used their best WAVA scores in each year as a measure of their performance, and tried to pick out which parts of their training were responsible. I know this is quite vague, because there's no guarantee that the mileage and the performances came at the same time of the year, no guarantee that these people were racing as hard as they could, and no guarantee that their data hadn't been completely fabricated by the FBI as part of a plot to fix a Test Match - but there are worse things you can prove with bad science, so indulge me if you can. First up, I looked at overall mileage, and it was here that I found most agreement:

Out of a sample of 225 runners, lots of them showed a fairly strong relationship between their overall mileage and their racing performances. A small proportion showed a negative relationship i.e. more mileage resulted in slower race performances. Although the maths might be paper-thin, it fits with experience - you can generally improve your times by adding more mileage to your training, but there comes a point where you just end up making your body more tired.

Next up I looked at speedwork (and for the sake of simplicity, I lumped Intervals, Tempo Runs and Fartleks together as one). I counted the number of sessions of each, and compared that to the 5xWAVA score outlined above. I realise with hindsight that I should maybe have looked at the proportion of sessions dedicated to speedwork - but it's nearly lunchtime on Friday, so you'll have to wait for another week for that one.

There's less of a correlation here than in the previous graph, but it still looks as though speedwork has a big part to play in improving your pace. That's as good as last week, when I proved conclusively that summer is often slightly warmer than winter. Finally (and this is the one I like best), I tried the same approach with recovery runs:

Rather pleasingly, lots of people seem to improve their times if they include recovery running as part of their schedule. This is perhaps less obvious, but it makes sense, and seems to be the underlying theme of my newsletters - in order to perform well, you've GOT to give your body chance to recover in between efforts. Maybe this week-long dose of man flu is a sign that I should follow my own advice!

Site news - if you read last weeks newsletter, you'll have seen that you can now import ready-made training plans into your own schedule. Thanks for all the nice comments about this new feature. You can now create and share your own plans for others to use - see here for details. The usual site rules about copyright apply - so please ask the permission of the author of a training plan before adding it to our list. However, I'm pleased to say that we've had permission from Human Kinetics to make use of the popular Pfitzinger & Douglas 55-70mpw and sub-55mpw 18 week marathon plans. If there's a particular plan you'd like to use, let me know, and I'll see if I can seek permission on your behalf. I hope to be adding Hal Higdon plans to the listing soon.

Blatant promotional news - just in time for the cold and dark, there's a variety of long sleeve and reflective kit available in the Fetch shop. Rave safe kids.

And finally, I just wanted to give a little mention to a bloke called Dave Heeley. In August next year, he'll be running and cycling from John O'Groats to Lands End in ten days - a marathon each day, and the remainder on a tandem. That's all the more impressive when you discover he's better known as "Blind Dave" (and no, he doesn't run a curtain shop). Follow Blind Dave's adventure here.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. One of the benefits of this cold is that the boy can shoe me in the face, and I can hardly feel it.

Today is a very special day. I've booked dinner at that restaurant you like, washed behind my ears, and I've given the dog a tenner and he's slunk off down to the betting shop. Yes folks, it's the six month anniversary of the newsletter! I hope you still get that tingly feeling inside every time it arrives in your inbox, and that you've grown accustomed to the fact that it now burps freely in front of you. Here's to many more.

Thanks to McGoohan, I avoided the gentle torture of the Friday newsletter deadline last week, so I've had nearly two weeks to spend wandering round the site, giving it a polish here and there, wiping off the bird droppings, and hoovering up the dog hair. For those who don't know, if you've got a problem with the site, or if you've got an idea for how to improve it, look out for the Feedback link in the top-right corner of every page. As I write this, there are 85 ideas and 13 bugs in my queue of things to do, but I don't always tackle them in order, so please just get in touch.

I thought I'd kick off this week with a look at the weather. It struck me that I'm handling the colder weather pretty well so far this year - at school pickup time last week I realised that all the other parents had big coats on, and I was in a t-shirt. True, I could have done with a jumper (and a shave, and a haircut, and a proper job), but I wondered whether running around in a vest for most of the year gives you added defences against the cold.

If you use the Training Log on Fetch, you will probably have seen that you can record the temperature, choosing anything from Hellish to Baltic. In between these two there are several grades of hot and cold, with "Perfect" in the middle as a default. Of course, lots of people just leave the default setting, but there's enough data to create a useful graph. Ignoring all the Perfects, I scored all the others according to their severity e.g. Baltic (-3), Hellish (+3), I set about calculating the average scores for each month. Each year was pretty similar, but I don't think I can offer enough evidence to deny the existence of global warming, so keep reusing your bags. Incidentally, I bought a sliced loaf from the local shop the other day, and they asked me if I wanted a bag for it. Anyway... here's the average temperature, month by month:

None of this is revolutionary of course. It's cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. Give me my Nobel Prize for producing pointless charts now. But it's got a pleasing shape to it, and whinging-about-the-cold season is quite clearly visible. The average dips down below perfect in October, and doesn't recover again until the end of March, and there's probably only two days in the entire year where we're all blissfully happy with the conditions. I would have thought that January would have scored colder than December, but perhaps we're all filled with optimism and covered with extra fat from the festive season. One day I'll also subdivide the data down even further, so I can see whether triathletes and / or faster runners complain more than most about the weather.

A bit of exciting site news now - I managed to get a place in the prestigious Brass Monkey Half Marathon last week, so there's been much talk at Fetch Towers about training schedules. To avoid doing any *actual* running, I've built a new feature that allows you to pick a predesigned training plan off the shelf, fiddle with it to suit your own requirements, and drop it straight into your training log. I've added a couple of Runner's World half marathon training plans into the tool for the sake of testing, but I will be adding more as soon as this newsletter has left my outbox. If you're wondering what the fudge I'm talking about, go check out your own Training Plan, and look for the shiny new links that let you choose a ready-made plan to work to. In coming weeks I will be adding the ability for you to create training plans to share with others, which I hope will be as exciting as it sounds in my head.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. You Listen. You Repeat. You Learn. Est-ce qu'il y a une piscine pres de la rue Broadwick? Acheter-vous la maisons?

Dear Fetchies,

It's that time of year, that time for runners when two unwelcome things coincide: one, the clocks go back; and two, it's Halloween. As everyone knows Halloween - or as the Americans call it Just-Gimme-The-Goddam-Chocolate-Day - is when escaped lunatics prowl nearby woods, the first day of the axe-murdering season and when vampires come out to play. In your entrails that is.

It doesn't take a werewolf or Freddie Krueger to make this time of year more hazardous for running though. Lots of things conspire. Chances are, if you have a nine-to-five job, most of your midweek runs will be conducted in the dark from now to the end of March. I asked Fetch for some numberwangs on the subject of just what time of day people run and he sent me many and copious ones. Here's a lovingly produced pair of graphs. Graph Uno shows the number of runs by hour spent in Oct-Nov - that bit of the year it's getting steadily darker - compared with Apr-Jun. This is when it should be getting lighter unless you live in Australia, in which case g'day Bruce, g'day Sheila.

What can we conclude from this? First, it doesn't matter what time of year it is, there will always be someone out there running, someone quite prepared to run in the dark. Unless you live in the northernmost tip of Scotland, it will get dark at some point, even in Summer. Having said that unless you migrate to Bruce and Sheila's, the Winter darkness starts about now and continues to Easter.

Second, even in the darkest months of the year, you guys want to get out there and run. Are you all nuts? Have you never seen Scream? Nightmare on Elm Street? Next year will be even worse because Halloween will also fall on Friday October 13th. That will be the spookiest Halloween ever.

Third, there is an obvious peak from 5pm to 7pm, though this could be when people are logging their runs rather than actually running them. Generally though, there were 53,000 runs during these hours from April to June but only 42,000 from October to December. People seem less keen to go out and run during the last quarter. But the chances are, if you do, it will be dark.

Spinning the board around, Graph Numero Duo is a general wangernumb of the whole year showing the distribution of when people go out running.

Pretty isn't it? Between midnight and four am, which is surely the middle of the night by anyone's reckoning, there were 934 separate instances of running lunacy across the year. And that's not even counting the werewolves and goblins. Not sure they're too diligent about logging their training though.

So let's fold up the graph paper for a moment and relax with a nice pipe and a mug of Bovril. Werewolves, goblins and former Eighties popstars driving haphazardly while off their face on wacky baccy notwithstanding, what other hazards might a night runner encounter and how might they be mitigated?

1. Seeing.
This might sound obvious but night time is really dark. I mean really, really, really dark. And as light sources go, frankly The Moon really isn't pulling its weight. In those dark hours, an interval session can become a series of quick sprints between oases of streetlamps across the bottomless voids of the unlit parts of the street. Head torch then? Have you ever tried wearing one? They give off all the light of a Chilean miner's mobile phone after six weeks. Plus they make your forehead sweat like a teenager watching his mother go through his internet browsing history.

But I tried, yes I tried. To have extra, extra, extra light I took the Cateye (TM, ©) light off my bike and held that in my hand while I strapped a head torch across my forehead.

It was like Starlight Express if instead of glamorous young stage school talent they'd cast it with fat balding fortysomething blokes with no rhythm. To make it extra hard for myself I went off road, though along a route that was familiar to me in daylight. For one thing, even two lights don't help much, especially since one of them is tied to your head. When you think 'what was THAT?' and turn your head, your light in front goes with it. It's at that moment that you nearly decapitate yourself on a nearby tree branch. Two lights can come in handy though, as they are very good at picking out the eerily glowing eyes of an eight foot tall vampire. Though it could, possibly, have been a cat sitting on an eight foot high fence. But which sounds more likely? Ask yourself that.

2) Being seen.
Now I'd like to go out in my black shoes, black socks, black leggings, black shorts, black top, black jacket and black cap. Possibly wearing a black balaclava too. It's a difficult look but I think I pull it off. The trouble is, car drivers love nothing better than trying to wing a runner/cyclist/pensioner then saying 'I didn't see you mate' or 'get off my bonnet, you're denting it' or 'I seem to have hit a ninja.'

There are a number of clothing solutions generally involving one or both of the words 'fluorescent' and 'reflective'. Rather bizarrely, road shoes tend to the more normal colours while many brands of trail shoe glow like some deep sea fish that's been lured to the surface and crudely and cruelly fashioned into something called MudSpangler by three year old Vietnamese children. Who needs their feet to glow when they're halfway up Helvellyn? You need your feet to glow when you're alongside a trickily unlit bit of the A4.

Inadvertently, or maybe subconsciously, I seem to have bought some glowing yellow and black shoes, some yellow and black shorts and a running jacket that the concept of 'yellow' just doesn't cover. It's the yellow equivalent of infra-red. When I have on the full ensemble, it's like an overweight wasp with a couple of legs missing wearing a particularly unsuccessful Manchester United away kit from the mid-Nineties.

3) Night vision.
If you're like me and have short-sightedness with an astigmatism and worsening presbyopia... well, you can't see very well unaided can you? A pair of specs or contact lenses can correct some of that, but what they can't do is make the awful night vision any better. In the dark, the 3D vision goes. As well as everything being presented in various shades of grey, it all assumes the same flattened plane. The kerb, that branch, that root, this stone, they're all equally far away. Or seem so. Mr Face, may I acquaint you with Mr Kerb? You've met already?

To avoid this I sometimes run at night with a gait that's somehow simultaneously mincing and cautious as if I'm dipping alternate toes in crab-infested rock pools. A sort of Lambeth-run-walk. On the plus side, it's a while since I've face planted; on the negative side you can add at least a minute per mile once it's dark.

Night vision goggles are not really an option unless you have far too much money to spend or you are in fact Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. In which case, I've put the lotion in the basket thanks very much. It was lovely.

4) Everyone and everything else
Drivers who have their cars on full beam, see another car coming the other way so dip their headlights and then go straight back to full beam afterwards thus blinding any other road/pavement user. Chelsea tractors are the worst: they're at such a height that their dipped is equivalent to a normal car's full beam. The best revenge is to wear something so reflective that it bounces their lights back into their own retinas.

The darkness also brings out the sweary teenage hecklers, lurking in their bus stops. Fortunately the cold weather also forces them to mumble their curses into their hoodies and they are no more threat than David Dickinson was to Mike Tyson in that ill-advised WBO title fight. Worst twenty quid I ever spent.

Then there are the other runners. No matter where you live, even in the unfriendliest, inner-citiest, Londonest part of the UK, if you see a fellow runner at 3am and you are sufficiently satisfied that they are not running from the scene of some crime, you have to say 'Hello'. If you don't maybe it's you who's the axe-murderer?

In conclusion, if you must go out at night, go somewhere well-lit - such as 'the same place, only five hours ago' - or carry a good light source. Most energy drinks will suffice in this regard. Wear something bright. And for God's sake, carry garlic and a cross.

I've been Nick Ross, this has been the Fetcheveryone newsletter. Now, don't have nightmares. And don't worry, there are no monsters under your bed. They've all moved into your wardrobe.

Happy Running,
McGoohan

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP.

I must say that this is one of the latest newsletters I've ever written, it being past nine o'clock on Friday evening. My contact lenses are feeling like cornflakes - so bear with me, and allow your attention to wander freely as I belch forth into your electronic boxes. I'm sitting with my nose tucked into my jumper, as the dog has decided it's fair game to sidle up to me and silently strip the hairs from my nostrils with one of his more potent creations. You'll be pleased to hear that this is not going to be the subject of this week's newsletter, although I will now attempt to tenuously link it into my subject material.

If you were going for a run, something to block up your nose would *not* be good, but something to occupy your ears is often a good thing. One of the most potent debates on running forums is whether it's acceptable for runners to listen to music when running, particularly in races. I would have thought that carrying a huge boom box on your shoulder would tend to affect your form, but as far as dinky little MP3 players are concerned, I think they're good company in a safe training environment, but I think it's just polite to respect the rules of any race you enter. Maybe all race marshals should be taught the international sign language for "OMG, you're not going to believe this, but that alien thing from that film with Sigourney Weaver, can't think of its name, but hey anyway, there's a small one on your shoulder, and it's making like it's just about to wrap itself around your face, and hey wouldn't that be a shame, given that you're on for a PB and all that". Actually, if Dan Brown ever gets chance to decipher the Macarena, I bet that's what it actually means.

Anyway... for the sake of balance, I should just say that I rarely go for a solo run without headphones these days, partially because they double as a hands-free for my phone, but also because I love listening to audio books and podcasts. I prefer bashy music if I'm going to do something involving panting, like intervals or a tempo, but for long and /or chilled out runs, I like something for my brain to chew.

I asked GordonG to help me come up with a list of interesting and/or useful podcasts for runners. He and fellow Fetchie Kevski produce Running and Life, a monthly podcast with a mixture of race reports, interviews and articles. They quite often feature news on other Fetchies (I think I saw them going through my bins the other night), so it's worth a listen. Here are some of the others he suggested:

• Marathon Talk - a weekly hour-long show hosted by Liz Yelling's husband Martin. It has the latest news from the racing world, as well as updates of the hosts' training and races.
• Running from the Reaper - another weekly show with thoughts and experiences recorded whilst running, from Nigel Staffordshire.
• Podcasts for Running - nine episodes following a journey from 'Couch to 9k' of a guy called Robert, based on the Cool Running plan.
• Phedipidations - a US-based weekly, this is one of the oldest running podcasts. Steve Runner shares his "...thoughts, opinions, observations and rambling diatribes composed during distance long runs".
• The Runner's Round Table - another US-based weekly, "where runners from the world share tips and tell stories". World-based runners you say?
• The Extra Mile Podcast - a fortnightly compendium of thoughts and chat about running while out on training runs.
• Marathon Training Academy - a fortnightly show hosted by Angie and Trevor.
• The Extra Mile Podcast - a fortnightly compendium of thoughts and chat about running while out on training runs.

If you want more running-based listening, try the aptly named Running Podcasts website for a huge list of all running-related podcasts from all over the world.

Of course, there are millions of non-running podcasts available, but any attempt to list the best would be endless, and never to anyone's taste. If you like the Fetch newsletter though, you might like what I like. My regular weekly listens include The Bugle (a funny look at the news), The Archers (it took me ages to learn all the different voices, and quite often, nothing happens for weeks, but I'm officially addicted now), and any of the usual 6.30 comedy you get on Radio 4. I'm also working my way through the Harry Potter books for about the 8th time - I can't help but find them fascinating.

Site News - and I should say for the benefit of anyone who's worried, that although I said the entire Fetchverse was contained in a small silver box on my lap, it also lives on a big server in the sky, with lots of flashy lights, and a team of highly dedicated ancient monks, who copy all your training data onto stone tablets, and beam them to outer space, where they float endlessly until needed.

You may also like to try the new WAVA Improvement table. It looks at your best race performances in the last three months, and at your best performances in the preceding three months, and works out a score showing how much you've improved.

For everyone that placed a pre-order for a Buff - they arrived at Fetch Towers today, and are already being packed up for dispatch early next week. We have about fifty left, so if you want one, please order soon.

And finally... I've asked McGoohan to step in and write the newsletter again next week, but please keep your feedbackM and suggestions coming in. Do you fancy being a guest writer at some point in the future? Is there anything you'd like me to investigate for you? Drop me a line, I'd love to hear from you.

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I've just got my own back on the dog. Ha.

I would like to start off today with an assurance that no fishermen were harmed in the making of last week's newsletter. Secondly, I would like to apologise for the lateness of this week's edition - I've got my boy this weekend, and I've been waiting anxiously all day for a consignment of sausage rolls. He's just gone to bed after five chapters of Fantastic Mr Fox, and some quality time spent covering my living room carpet in polystyrene. I have a jazzy new laptop, which now means that the entirety of the Fetchverse is now contained in a 2.5kg brushed aluminium box. Hello in there!

Back in a very early newsletter, I looked at how quickly 5k times improve for new runners. I thought I would try a similar exercise for half marathon runners, but take things a little further by looking at how the mileage burden tends to alter. I found 234 runners who had run at least ten half marathons, and who had recorded training consistently for the four months preceding each race. First up, I looked at how quickly the PB's tumbled.

The graph is broken into four curves, each representing a group of runners. The blues are the fastest runners, with debut half marathon times of between 1:16 and 1:34, and as you might expect, they show the smallest improvement, as they have least room to do so. But even so, ten races at the distance can see their initial times drop by about 5%. There's fantastic news for the purples (debut half marathon between 1:57 and 2:39) - ten races can see you improve by more than 10%.

There's always a lot of talk about how increasing mileage is one of the key factors in beating your personal bests, so I thought I'd see whether the trends in the graph above were mirrored by mileage increases. For each runner, I took their debut training mileage as a baseline, and calculated the percentage change for each subsequent race.

So for example, if you're running your fourth half, you may well be doing about 17% more mileage than when you ran your first one, and if you stick with it until you've run ten half marathons, you're probably running about 30% more. So it's not just the case that faster runners do more mileage. We can all *become* faster runners by doing more mileage. Mostly. Not a guarantee. The value of your shins can go up or down. Of course these figures represent middle of the road runners, and there are those who actually reduce their mileage. This could be down to a more structured training program, or good cross-training, or just the experience that comes with regular racing.

Site news now, and many of you have discovered the small joys of typing *pig* into forum posts. If there's an icon you'd like to see, please send me feedback, and I'll pick my favourite. And I might add a few more hidden ones for you all to find.

I am really pleased to tell you that your donations to Mick and Phil since last week's newsletter amount to a fantastic £538, which will go a long way towards helping them. If you work for Vaseline however, Mick would like to discuss being one of your faces of 2011, or failing that, whether it's viable to have a pipeline installed. Thank you Everyone!

I also had a good chat with Ian Vaughan-Arbuckle, Race Director at the Round Norfolk Relay. They had a successful event this year, but the 'colourful' nature of the Fetch teams was definitely missed, not least by the bar and the local Dominos. I'm quietly optimistic that we can get at least one team in next year's race - keep an eye out for further information.

And finally, it's Abingdon Marathon this weekend, and I'd like to send a "you go girl" to all the runners, and invite you all to watch I don't think it's a potato! by Kristyna Vosecka - proof if it were needed that it takes balls to run a marathon.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. And Simon was like... "Put your hands on your head". And Simon was like... "Stand on one leg". And like... "Put your finger on your nose". And I was like... "Simon didn't say".

The inspiration for this week's newsletter came about 1.5 miles into my run on Saturday morning. I was making my way jauntily along a canal path, admiring the clearness of the water, and minding my own business, when suddenly my foot hit an uneven patch of tarmac, and I hit the deck like a sack of spuds. Now I've been running for seven years, and this was the first time I'd fallen over, so it was quite a shock. My survival instincts did kick in though, and I twisted my body to one side, using my left knee, left shoulder, my face, and the palm of my right hand, to protect my Garmin. When I think of the stats that could have been lost, I shudder. A fisherman stood watching me about 20 yards away, rolling a cigarette. "Ow", I said. He nodded, and watched with a small smile as I scrambled to my feet, flicked some of the bigger bits of gravel out of my flesh, and ran on, wincing.

So this week, I'm going to talk about how to catch and gut a fisherman. No wait, it's still not legal in this country is it? Anyway... it gave me the inspiration to revisit the Injury section on the site, and give it the once over with a cold sponge and the magic spray.

If you suffer the misfortune of a running injury, visit the Injury section, and choose Add An Injury from the submenu. Choose which body part, and how severe the problem is, and provide a description. It's also a really great idea to tick the Public box, as you may well get some friendly advice from other runners, or by sharing your experiences, you can help other people with similar problems. If you nose around the Injury section a bit, there are plenty of gruesome tales to keep you occupied as you get better.

Once you've added your injury, you can record regular notes against it, and update the severity as it improves. You'll see a box like this that will appear on the side of the page until you mark your injury as fixed:

For those of you that like a low-maintenance solution, you can just click the numbers to track the severity of your injury, or you can click "View Case Notes" to view your injury information in full, and to add more detail. Adjusting the severity level on a daily basis will be very helpful for others, as it allows the site to make a graph like this:

Though every injury is different, and there's no substitute for putting it in the hands of a professional (matron), I hope that capturing this sort of information will help, in what is always a worrying time. Contributing your information may help to make some fantastic graphs in a future newsletter, but please don't go throwing yourselves in front of fisherman, and run safely.

The newsletter wouldn't be complete without a graph though, and although the previous injury recording system wasn't great, I've managed to squeak out this one, which shows which parts of the body have suffered the most. Note that this is just a record of the number of injuries, with no allowance for severity.

There's another cool update to the site that I'd also like to share. If you go to the Training section, there's a bit that looks like this:

You can specify a mileage for your swimming, biking and running for the whole of the year, and this box will show you how you're doing. In the example (which shows my running mileage target for the year), I've completed 593 miles out of my 750 mile target (which is 79%), and I'm "up" by 15.2 miles on where I should be at this point in the year (woohoo - go me!). If you find yourself adrift of your target, the system shows a little speech bubble - roll over it to see what sort of weekly mileage you should aim for to still hit your target.

And finally... if you need a bit of inspiration to overcome your injuries and hit your targets, I would like to introduce you to Mick and Phil Curry. Phil has Cerebral Palsy and Sodium Valproate syndrome, which means he is completely dependent on his dad for all his needs. Mick has pushed Phil in his wheelchair round more than 40 marathons, and over 200 half marathons, and they've given countless runners a boost with their "Easy, Easy, Easy" chant, and redoubtable stamina. They could do with a bit of help at the moment - they are trying to put together some money to get a bigger Mobility car, so that Phil's chair and Mrs Mick's scooter can fit inside, whilst leaving enough room for sarnies and Mick's supply of Vaseline. If you can donate a few quid to help, please either use the Paypal link on their website, or reply to this newsletter and I'll be happy to put you in touch.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. At least he wasn't fiddling with his flies.

As I write this, many of you will be standing on your front step, hopping from foot to foot, waiting for the postie, or maybe the more proactive among you will have made it to your local sorting office, and are currently attempting to throttle the staff so you can have a good root round the letters, as you hanker desperately for news of your success or otherwise in the London Marathon ballot. It's an exciting time indeed, and for about 1000 Fetchies, it'll be a very smiley day. Good luck!

There are also a lot of you about to start tapering for Abingdon Marathon which is becoming one of the most popular Fetch-fests (the fourth most popular marathon, after London, Edinburgh and Brighton). It's where I crawled round my first marathon, and when you reach the bushes just before the running track at the end, picture me rolling into those very same bushes with cramp, then soldier on - you're nearly there.

So this week, I am going to look at marathon tapering - the art of resting your body after a long period of training, just before a big race. It's almost universally agreed that tapering for a marathon begins about three weeks out from the big day (unless you're the sort of person who runs them week in week out, in which case please teach us all a thing or two about running!). I looked at 1666 marathon runners, from 3:15 up to 5:00, and the 16 weeks of training they recorded in the build-up. The 3:15 runners put in nearly twice the amount of mileage that the 5:00 runners did, but I was more interested in the shape of their mileage. If you ran the same mileage every week for 16 weeks, each week would contribute 6.25% to the overall mileage - but as most runners know, marathon training is all about a slow increase in mileage. Using the latest numberwang techniques, I found that the shape of a typical marathon plan looks like the following graph, whether you run 3:15 or 5:00.

So for example, your first week contributes 5.4% of the overall mileage of your plan. The ramp up at the start looks fairly smooth - with just a bobbly hint of the rest weeks that all good training plans should include. Because people take their rest weeks at slightly different times, they get "smoothed out" of the data. For most runners, your mileage peaks at about seven weeks out from race day, flattens out until the three week point, then comes down gently towards race day. For the sticklers among you, I am counting week zero as being the seven days before but not including race day.

The part of this graph I am most interested in today is the last four weeks. The peak week contributes 7.2% of the overall training plan mileage, then the third week out is 6.6%, the second week out is 5.1%, and the last seven days before the race contribute just 2% of your overall mileage. To make more sense of this, here's a table that shows some example peak mileages, and how the taper weeks would look:

Peak Mileage	Taper Week 2	Taper Week 1	Taper Week 0
30	28	21	8
40	37	28	11
50	46	35	14
60	55	42	17

As a very approximate rule of thumb, make week two 90% of your peak, week one 70% of your peak, and week zero 30% of your peak.

Hopefully you will have noticed the green loveliness of Macmillan Cancer Support enveloping today's newsletter. They are keen to hear from runners who would like to fundraise for them at next year's London Marathon. If you were unsuccessful in the ballot, they have a select number of guaranteed entries for the race, which they distribute to runners who agree to raise a set amount in sponsorship. All you need to do is complete their application form. Even if you've already got your place in London, they'd be delighted if you'd consider simply raising as much sponsorship as you can on their behalf. They will do their utmost to look after you, with pasta parties, amazing cheering points and post-race massage therapists - and if anyone knows about caring for others, it's these guys. To find out more, please call them on 020 7840 7878, email to londonmarathon@macmillan.org.uk or visit www.macmillan.org.uk/londonmarathon. They operate a similar scheme for other big marathons, such as Paris, Brighton, Edinburgh, Berlin and New York - so please consider helping them in their quest to help people affected by cancer. They'd love to have you on their 2011 team! See them in action at VLM 2010.

Site news - you might like to try the new Autumn skin, called 'Conkers'. Log in to the site, and scroll to the very bottom of the page, and choose a skin. Or just click here. If you're a Photoshop user, and fancy having a play with a PSD file to create a different skin and colour scheme, get in touch. It would be great to see Halloween, Bonfire night, and Christmas ones, to name a few.

Time has officially run out if you want to order a Fetch Hoodie, but I will be calling the manufacturer on Monday - so place an order before then and you'll be ok. I will order a spare in each size, but no more - so get your order in quick if you don't want to wait 'til next time.

Finally - you should also be receiving the October Race Guide later on today. It's usually much earlier, but it's awkward when the first day of the month falls on a Friday, plus I like to personally check the distance of each race course, using a pack of trained hamsters, some elastic, and a shocking disregard for the laws of physics.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I hope you liked the newsletter - I turned down a cup of tea with Silvershadow to finish it off!

I'm having one of those weeks where time and circumstance are conspiring to make a monkey out of me. In a hurry to collect the stats for this weeks newsletter, the letter 'G' (and the backspace key for good measure) just stopped working on my laptop. Relying on my geek bushcraft skills, I went for the good old reboot, only to violently remember that my Windows password has a 'G' in it. At this point I tried my fallback option, which was to press the 'G' repeatedly and heavily, whilst telling the computer exactly what it could do with a lifetime supply of chocolate. It was similarly unimpressed. In the end I had to calm the funk down, unscrew the keyboard, and check for bits of dog under the keys. I didn't find any, but the act of checking seems to have done the trick. I wonder whether they call it Windows because at some point in your life you will end up putting a computer through one.

I thought I'd follow up Speed Work 101 with a look at Long Runs - although hopefully there will be a few more stats to enjoy in this one. On the surface, it's probably the easiest component of a training plan to understand - indeed, it's the first thing I map out when I'm writing myself a plan. At its most basic, the long run prepares your body to cope with running for a long time. There's nothing like an eight mile run to make four miles seem manageable (except perhaps catching the bus).

The key to success with long runs is to take your time. If you want to be a faster runner, do speed work, but do it some other day. Running long is as much about time on your feet as it is about mileage, so there really is no need to rush. Sunday mornings are the absolute best time. The rest of the family are tucked up in bed, the alcopop-swilling, kebab-guzzling feral types are still incarcerated (unless they *are* your family), and you've got the rest of Sunday to relax, and there might even be a good Leslie Phillips film on BBC2.

I looked at half marathon runners and their five longest training runs prior to racing. I wanted to see if faster runners took their longer runs at an easier pace. The following graph shows race pace (red line) versus the average pace of the five longest runs (blue line). As race performances improve, there's a tendency to reduce the pace of the long run. At one end of the scale, the 70-minute half runners do their long runs around 1m20s slower than race pace, whereas the 2:20 runners do their long runs at the same pace as they race. The lesson is as simple and beautiful as Roy Castle playing his trumpet. The faster you want to be, the more important it is to take your time over your long run.

The other thing you'll no doubt be interested in is how far you should go. I think the server would probably crumble if I tried to get the whole set of stats in one go, so I had to cut things down a bit. I looked at some vaguely equivalent performances (using 40%, 50%, 60% and 70% WAVA for a 34yo male) for 5k, 10k, Half and Marathon, and found out what the typical long run would be.

The graph above takes a bit of getting used to. The individual curves represent the ability of the athlete (70% WAVA at the top, 40% WAVA at the bottom). For example, a 40% WAVA runner might turn in a six mile long run in preparation for a 5k, but a 70% runner may well run anything up to half marathon distance. These figures are prone to much cloudiness - our 70% runner, being quite good at it, may well be running in lots of races, and not training specifically for 5k. However, what I think this graph does do quite well is to give you a ball park figure to aim at for your long runs when training... and it shows how faster runners show an increased commitment to going long.

There's plenty more to learn about long running - but as usual, time is short, and I'm happy to get the basics in place, so we can push on in future weeks.

Site news - and I hope that most of the bugs relating to the redesign have been ironed out, although I know that a few of you are having problems viewing the site on your mobiles. I am in the process of building a mobile-specific version of the site, that will be a bit less fancy, but will hopefully work on a wider variety of devices. Please bear with me whilst I get that in place. Meanwhile, please let me know what you think via these two polls: Does the new website work ok for you? and Do you like the way the website looks? - or just reply to this email.

I am also pleased to announce that you can now place your pre-order for Buffs and Hoodies in the Fetch Shop. Hoodie pre-ordering will be open until October 1st (because they come in so many different sizes), and we hope to get all Hoodies and Buffs out by the end of October - so place your orders now to avoid disappointment.

The nice folks at Men's Health have given me a special offer to pass on to you. Check out Survival of the Fittest - coming soon in Edinburgh, Nottingham and Cardiff. We've got some exclusive places, and 10% off for Fetch members, using discount code FETCH101. There are only a handful of places available at each of the venues, so if you're a fan of being tortured whilst running, check it out.

If you're a dog owner, you might also like to check out this Canine Aquathon just outside Southampton. Arnie fell in the canal earlier this week, and having experienced the amount of water he can shake off him, I can only imagine just how messy that race is going to be.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Wait! Strike that. Reverse it.

A big apology to those of you who've missed your newsletter this week - so here is a Sunday morning, sat up in bed with a seedy bagel, GNR on the telly in the background, CBA to get up and do anything version. If you've been on the website since Thursday, you'll have some idea what I've been doing instead of sending the newsletter out on time. The site has had a bit of time with Gok Wan, and he's rolled up its sleeves, done its hair, and bought it some new control pants.

When I first started working on the web, there was just Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator to worry about, but now there are so many different browsers, different versions of those browsers, different screen sizes, and people accessing the site on all sorts of hand-held chunks of electronics - each with its own unique method of deciding how to interpret my page designs. It's been quite a busy time trying to get it all working right, hence my tardiness in weekly news stakes. I also spent several days last week with a stomach that felt like a washing machine full of puppies, so forgive me please.

Anyway... I thought it would be good to walk everyone round the new design, to make sure you know what's what, and what's where. The most notable thing is that the site is a whole lot wider. The original site was designed back in 2004, and in those days, it was the standard width that fitted on most screens. Nowadays though everything is HD, and widescreen, and so it was time to join in. I myself have doubled my cream cracker intake to join the revolution.

The new group of links at the very top right of the screen are a collection of all the popular functions of the site that have previously been scattered around the place - the Do Stuff Quickly menu, Fmail, Notifications (these only show up when you actually have them), your own user profile, feedback, and search. You may need to do a CTRL+F5 to make sure all these are working properly.

There's also a new little nodule on the right, hanging below the main navigation area - once you're logged in, it gives you a very quick way of entering your latest piece of training. I have it in mind that this could be a bit smarter still... on race days, it could have a box waiting for you to enter your time. And once you'd entered some training for the day, it could switch to showing you a small version of your training plan. But that's pie in the sky for now.

Some other changes... the route mapper has been fiddled with to give you a bit more room to see your maps... the Notes field on the Add Training page has been given loads more space... there's a new Tweet feed on the home page... the Rank section has been updated... the Training home page has been tidied up a bit... go explore.

For those of you that are offended by red, you can also change the site skin. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, look in the right-hand corner, and you'll see some options for alternative skins. Redmond is quite good for a bit of under-cover Fetching at work, and I'm loving the sunny yellow and black contrast of Somer at the moment. If you've got any suggestions for colour schemes, let me know.

It would be great to get your feedback on the new design, so I've set up a couple of polls: Does the new website work ok for you? and Do you like the way the website looks?. Please take a few moments to click - it's really appreciated. You can also send me a feedback with any other comments you'd like to make. I've undoubtedly failed to fatten out every single piece of content on the site, so if you see something that doesn't look right, let me know. If you're having serious problems getting something to work, let me know which browser you're using, and whether you're on a PC / Mac / Mobile / surf board.

Site news - please buy a copy of Runner's World at the end of September (or at least stand in Tesco and read it). A Brief History of Fetch is in there somewhere.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Take this bus to Cuba!

On my way home from parkrun last Saturday I was given a real treat. I think I mistakenly drove into the wrong lane, and was honked at, roaringly undertaken, and given such a spectacularly executed middle finger, I would not have been surprised to discover the driver of the angry car was classically trained. And the speed at which he must have wound down his window was second only to the speed at which he drove off.

So this newsletter is dedicated to that angry little sausage, going everywhere as fast as he can, right behind your bumper - and how to increase your own speed in training without turning into him. We'll gloss over the fact that I probably should have checked my mirrors and gitsensors. By the way, I would normally have called him a much naughtier word, but every time I use anything remotely naughty, about 500 newsletters get rejected by email servers running Windows 1955.

The key to becoming a faster runner is not to try to be a faster runner all the time. As the knucklehead illustrated perfectly, going everywhere at top speed is dangerous - you burn petrol faster, you risk wrapping yourself around an injury lamp-post, and you look like a bit of a tool. Instead, think of your training as a mixture of endurance; speed; and not breaking yourself. Even if you only run three times a week, you can still structure things simply as 1) Try to run a bit longer, 2) Try to run a bit faster, and 3) Do What You Feel (although don't treat it like the last day of school and take Kerplunk). If you train more regularly, you can start to look at your weekly sessions as a spectrum encompassing all those components.

Let's focus on speed work, and specifically Intervals. Put simply, interval training involves running a bit faster than usual for a short "interval" of time, then a bit of time to recover, and then repeating the same process several times. The idea is that you can nudge your body out of its comfort zone for a decent length of time, by using the recoveries to regulate the stress. It's important not to rush into it - get your body used to the idea of regular weekly running first, that's quite enough of a challenge in itself - and before putting any more stress on your body, it's worth getting yourself checked out, just in case your big end has gone. But if you've decided to take the plunge, here's some advice to get you started.

It's good to warm up with a bit of mild runniness for 10-15 minutes before hand, and it's quite nice to take a similar amount of time to trot back home, thinking about what you've just done (and if you insist on bringing Kerplunk, the warm down would be the best time for a quick game).

It seems like a complicated business deciding how many intervals to do, how far they should be, and how long you should spend recovering between each one - but there are a few simple guidelines to help, and there's nothing wrong with trying a few things out, so long as you keep your aims realistic. Generally speaking, the length of your intervals varies according to the length of your goal race - so you might do 400m intervals for shorter races like 5k's... and anything up to two miles at a time for marathon training.

For recovery, heart rate is often used as a barometer - you could wait until your heart rate drops below say 120bpm. Or, if you don't have a HRM (Argos do one with a chest strap for under £20), you can wait until your breathing gets back to normal, or give yourself a fixed 2-3 minutes recovery time. It's best to keep moving a little bit between intervals, to keep warm and loose, so jog gently, walk, or hide in the bushes and pretend you're an unhinged fowl.

As for how long your session should be... typically most people spend about 25-40 minutes on a session. For a 5k, you might build up to 10 x 400m, and for a marathon, you might look at doing 3 x 2 miles - and you can generally pick something in between for the distances in between.

The key phrase above is "build up" - as a new speed worker, you could start with 6 x 400m, or 3 x 1 miles, with generous recoveries - and GENTLY take things up a notch every couple of weeks, maybe adding one extra interval, or trimming the recoveries by 10s. To avoid turning every week into a competition, I've found it useful to do a slightly different session each week - so maybe 3 x 1 miles one week, and 3 x 2k the next, and then back to miles the following week. By having a non-weekly cycle, it's much easier to see improvements as you look back.

As for pace... I know there are lots of calculators that tell you how fast you should be running, depending on your goal race pace, but I know that a lot of people aren't 100% sure about what they are capable of. So I'm going to suggest that you start cautiously, and let your body guide you. It's hard as a beginner to judge your pace, and it's tempting to run the first interval like Usain Bolt on skates, but try to pick a pace that you can maintain over the entire session. Even a 1% increase in speed will add up very quickly over a few months. Remember that speed work pushes you out of your comfort zone, so try to arrange your weekly sessions so that you don't do two hard runs close together.

Site news - and we've been having a great time on the Pesterers vs Lazybones thread. Members of the two groups are randomly assigned to each other every day... and the rest is up to their imagination.

So that's it for this week - no graphs sorry, but I hope it helped a few people. This may have been a bit of a snooze for those of you with experience of speed work, but I'm sure that if you drop me a line and suggest further lines of enquiry, I'd be happy to oblige now that we've got the basics. I'd also like to look at Fetch training logs, to see if I can spot any noticeable speed work trends.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Fetch Everyone is an equal opportunities website. Which is to say we have our fair share of idiots.

If there's one month that punctuates the year more than most, it's September. Not only does it unite us all in a life-long association with the return to school, with fresh pages, new pencil cases, timetables and inky memories of what I did in my summer holidays - it also sees a marked change in the weather, more noticeable than any other time. The muggy oppressive warmth of summer is sucked out overnight, as though someone has left the back door wide open, and I scrabble for sleeves and layers, as the evenings are chewed up by the night. But it's one of my favourite times of the year. The air relaxes, the winter is still in hiding, and I run through cool-but-warm streets, watching the summer people retire to their front rooms with their enormous televisions, and ubiquitous black and white floral feature wallpaper. If you run at the right time, you can catch an entire episode of Animal Hospital. When the rest of the world is packing up and shutting down, it's a great time to feel the life and energy that running gives you. Lord help me when there are leaves to crunch too.

I am pleased to announce that Iain McCallum wins a Garmin Forerunner 110. Competition entrants had to find a novel way to Fetch Everyone, and Iain did so by spreading the word to a captive audience on HMS Ark Royal. He also recommends training on an aircraft carrier as a way of improving your GPS-based stats, clocking up an impressive 20 miles in just 45 minutes. Other noteworthy entries included a toilet-door sticker campaign (I'm still getting phonecalls), a fully-Fetched-up pub crawl, plastering a cruise ship gym with home-made posters, and running with a bunting-laden buggy in Fetch colours through town. I have been watching the TV all week in the hope of catching a glimpse of Terry Wogan in a Fetch vest, but I guess he probably wears it under his suits.

In an early newsletter, I looked at how different race distances have "seasons" throughout the year. In tribute to Septembers seasonal gear crunch, I thought I'd see whether there was a similar pattern in training mileage. I looked at all the training recorded in 2009, and worked out the median mileages for individuals (as a group we ran 3.1 million miles in the year, up from 2.2 million in 2008).

There's a nice little peak of new year enthusiasm in January, apathy in February, long-distance / marathon build-up in March, then a decay to another low in June, before mileage bubbles upwards through the summer, reaching a second peak in September (good times folks!), and then snowboarding downwards to the depths of winter. Overall, the typical Fetchie runs 907 miles a year. If there's anyone out there thinking that's a lot, don't worry - I've only ever done that once in six years of trying, and if I can get away with it, so can you. One of the things I occasionally hear is that people see all the amazing feats of marathon running, and huge mileages, and think it's somehow normal, and this often leads people to think they are not doing enough. The reality you can see on any high street is that just by getting out and exercising, you're already quite special.

To keep the triathletes happy, I also made the same graph for cycling (typical total = 645). There's quite a different pattern here - one large summer peak, albeit with a very definite dent in July - do they all sit at home watching Le Tour and getting biscuit crumbs in their lycra? By the way, in case you're wondering, this doesn't mean a typical Fetchie runs 907 miles, AND cycles 645. I tried making the same graph for swimming too, but the results were just *weird* - I think mainly because they are the group most confused by metres and kilometres - it must be the chlorine.

Site news - and it's time for a social / training experiment. Some days I just can't be bothered to go out for a run. When this happens, I usually just don't bother, and sit on my backside and eat my bodyweight in hula hoops - but occasionally a good friend will give me a nudge in the right direction, and get me going. So to see if this effect can be replicated on a grand scale, I've created two groups - the Pesterers, and the Lazybones. If you need a bit of a regular shove to get your shoes on, join the Lazybones, and if you fancy pretending you're Windsor Davies, join the Pesterers (shoulders back, lovely boy). Every day, each Lazybones will be assigned a random Pesterer to prod them in the right direction. Of course, most of us don't run *every* day, and I ask all participants to retain common sense, but a random nudge from a random Fetchie might just help you achieve your running / fitness goals, whatever they are. I also thought it might be interesting to throw together people with differing outlooks on training. The pestering begins on Monday.

And finally... this Sunday marks six years since my first ever race, and I've always considered it to be something of an anniversary for the site. I hope it's a good day for you too.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS I have been asked to bang the drum for the lovely people at Sports Tours, who can organise everything you need to run the New York Marathon. Time is nearly up if you want to join them this year, so please have a nose at their website.

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. This should cheer you up for sure; see I've got your old ID; and you're all dressed up like The Cure.

It's hard to believe that this is the 17th edition of the newsletter, and I'm still going strong. When I say going strong, I mean that the mention of the newsletter doesn't yet reduce me to a heap on the floor. And when I say 'edition', I realise that implies that there's some sort of rigorous editing process in place - I apologise for misleading you. Stats fans may like to know that we're reached a little milestone - our 100th unsubscriber as a direct result of the newsletter. Most of these are people who have dipped their toe very briefly into Fetch at some point in the past, and retreated hastily, nervously watching the rest of us swim around deliriously shouting It's Frothy Man. Thank you for trying.

I explored a few dead ends this week, but I'll throw them in, just so you know I'm thinking about different stuff, and that it's not all cutting-edge pseudo-science here at Fetch Towers. There was a suggestion via Twitter a few days back that I should look at the relationship between weight and running performance. The judges on Britain's Next Top Model also told one of the contestants this week that she needed to lose some weight, which was so completely shocking that I promise here and now never to do a weight versus performance graph for as long as I live. If you can get out 2-3 times a week, you're doing ok, really. I also looked at whether height was a factor, but despite sample data from over 1800 runners, I couldn't see that it made any difference at all. This is a Good Thing, because it minimises my chances of being cited in any chainsaw- or stilt-based court cases.

So with two non-starters under my belt, I thought I'd try to use the remaining space to answer a question from Coffee Addict about long-term running. The question was... how many runners keep up with continuous training before suffering blips or burnouts? There are people who have committed a mammoth amount of miles to FE, like Gaztop and Podkin, with 21 years of training data each, but I also found a nice little set of runners who had recorded their efforts consistently over the last six years, and looked at their monthly totals to see if I could measure the amount of time out these folks were taking. If numbers make you squeamish, you might want to look away now, it's going to get messy. I chose runners who regularly averaged 50 miles or more per month, and at least 2000 miles over the time period. Taking a leap of faith that these folks had recorded all their training, I calculated an average mileage for each of the runners in my sample, and then counted up the number of months in which they fell below this average, and by how much. Got all that? Good. This graph shows how it all finally came together.

For example, over a five year period, a typical runner will go through about five complete months where they run less than 20% of their usual mileage, and about 12 months where they run less than half of their usual mileage, whether through injury, time out, prison sentence, large pile of ironing, stapling accident, severe key loss, CBA, whatever. Of course, there's a big assumption here - that the desire and capability to complete an average workload is constant throughout the five years. I only really started running in 2004, so although I've logged my training consistently since then, the early years of lower mileage will cause a bit of a skew. The analysis may have flaws, but there is a valuable message, and it's the same one I keep banging on about: If you enjoy running, and want to keep enjoying it long-term, it really is ok to have a month or so here and there when you take it easy. Concentrate on effort, but concentrate on recovery too.

There's not a great deal of site news this week. I am making good progress with the redesign, and hope to put it live in the next couple of weeks. In fact, let's say September 13th, just to put a bit of pressure on me to get it done. I must remind you to enter the competition to Win a Garmin Forerunner 110 - I've had a few entries in so far, but ridiculously few considering the winner will get £170 worth of shiny electronics, just for pimping out the website to all and sundry.

If you joined the Fetch Hoodies Group to express your interest in a new Fetch Hoodie, thank you - and if you didn't, it's not too late. We will be opening up the shop to take pre-orders next week. If you'd like a Black Fetch Buff, you know the drill - join the Black Fetch Buffs group to help me count numbers.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Jacket On. Jacket Off.

Normally I reserve the first paragraph of the newsletter to set the scene - maybe to explain which particular wireless network I'm snaffling bytes from, or to tell you how the dog is, or to prepare you gently for the shocking attempt at scientific analysis that follows. But today I am very excited, because I have a COMPETITION to wow you with! A Garmin Forerunner 110 (RRP Loads) could be yours, just by taking my challenge. Exciting huh? Garmin very kindly sent me one to test with (read on), so I've taken it out a few times - but I've had it back by a decent hour, paid for all its drinks and been the perfect gent. I must say (and not because I have to), that it's wonderfully light, the flexible strap is more comfortable to wear than the 405, the user interface has been honed to be very straightforward, and it looks nothing like a teleportation device or electronic tag. In the interests of balance, the snap-on connection to the PC is a bit fiddly compared to previous models, but it's not so bad.

Anyway... back to the newsletter. In my Twitter feed this week I promised a shoestravaganza. I'm not quite sure when a shoe-related newsletter reaches ganzic proportions, so I will do my best to set a standard by which all other shoe-related newsletters shall henceforth be judged.

I'll start by telling you that we've just gone past 30,000 pairs of shoes stored in the Fetch database. ASICS lead the pack, accounting for 9142 of these pairs (30%), with Nike a distant second with 4221 pairs (13.8%). The following graph shows the leading manufacturers:

You may well have read or heard that a typical mileage for ditching your trainers is around 500 - and I thought I'd put that to the test. I looked at all the retired shoes in the database, ignoring all those with a mileage of less than 100 (if you get dump your trainers before this, it's probably not because they're worn out). The following shows the median figures for the same manufacturers - all pretty consistent at around the 400 mark, although the off-roading Inov-8's are understandably a little lower because of all the huge rocks and ooomshka. By the way... even when your shoes are past their running best, they can still make someone else happy - recycle your old shoes.

For my final trick, I thought I'd look at some race performances, and see whether there was any sort of relationship between manufacturer and performance. My gosh I can feel the eyes of eight marketing executives bearing down on me. PLEASE don't think that I'm saying that one brand is better than another. I am all in favour of picking a brand and model that works for you. I'm not a fast Fetchie, but I wear New Balance regularly, and my footsies are very happy about it. I looked at the top 20% of Fetchie race performances over 5k, 10k, half and marathon, and counted up the number of times a manufacturer was used (at this point, I had to leave Inov-8 out, because they are primarily an off-road shoe). Based on pure volume of runners, Asics contributed most runners in all categories - but I thought it'd be interesting to add market share into the mix. For example, Adidas have a 6.4% share of the Fetchie market, but they pick up 6.61% of the faster runners. This graph shows which shoes are punching above their weight. It would be very interesting to see how the graph looks for slower runners, but I'm running out of time this week.

Site news... and I'm pleased to let you know that Garmin Forerunner 110 and Garmin Edge 500 owners can finally import their training data. Just plug it in, go to the usual Garmin Import page, and when it smells what a snazzy gadget you've got, it'll take to your own VIP data entering thing. I drank a lot of wine when I wrote the code, so let me know if it's not working quite right, or if it appears eerily sentient.

I also had a nice thank you from the people at ASBAH this week, for the £100 we raised by auctioning the backboard from the London Marathon exhibition. Thanks to SarahL for her winning bid, to everyone else who biddeded, and to 1step2far and barking for struggling home on the tube with it.

There's been a minor clamour for Fetch Hoodies, now that the British Summer is doing its worst. We probably get one batch a year, so if you want one, the time for action is now - please join the hoodies group to register your interest.

And finally, a little bit of sad news. I got an fmail last night about a Fetchie called Billy aka Paul Maguire, who passed away in 2008 after a battle with cancer. If you're anywhere near Stevenage on the 29th August, please consider running the Paul Maguire Memorial 5. Thank you.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Smange. Nearly forgot. Hello Clatters :-)

I'm writing this paragraph last, as it's the most fun, and also the hardest. The effort of writing and compiling the information that follows has caused the bit of Blu-tak that was holding part of my glasses together to melt. You know that wobbly bit that sits against your nose? If anyone knows where I can get one, please let me know.

It's the local triathlon this Sunday, so I thought I might do a bit of sniffing about to see whether I could come up with any useful information about the noble and ancient art of swimming for a bit, then jumping on your Boardman Team XL Carbon Fibre Julienne Fries Rocket Bike, then getting off again and running for a bit. I will freely admit to being largely ignorant about the sport, but its fans seem to be rather keen, so I thought I'd see what sort of dent these people have made in the Fetchie consciousness, and whether I am up to the challenge of thrilling these wraparound-shaded space-lycra streamlined athlo-gods.

For the uninformed, the following table shows the most popular triathlon race distances. The figure in the last column shows the number of performances recorded by Fetchies against each distance. The thing that's most noticeable for me is the enormous crashing together of systems of measurement - miles, kilometres, and ancient greek all battling for supremacy. The distances are not especially consistent (there were 856 triathlon performances in the database, so over half of them are "Other" distance-wise), but the thing I like best is that running really has got it sussed. When it came to choosing distances, we obviously got in first with the naming scheme.

Distance	Swim	Bike	Run	Performances
Iron Man	3.86km	180km	Marathon	43
Half Iron Man	1.93km	90km	Half Marathon	42
Olympic	1500m	40k	10k	107
Sprint	750m	20k	5k	66
Sprint (yes, I know)	400m	20k	5k	92
Eh?	400m	23k	5k	45

Putting aside the obvious superiority of running over not just swimming and biking, but over any other activity ending in -ing, it seems that most triathlons are roughly 2% swimming, 78% biking, and 20% running - at least in distance terms. Is this the work of a superior being, who has decided that running one mile is about as hard as biking four miles, and that swimming one mile is as tough as running ten? And that swimming ten miles might be cheaper than getting the bus, but comes with its own complications?

To go some way to measuring this, I looked at the performances of all our Fetchie triathletes, to see how much time is spent doing each bit. I'm aware that you'd all like to be able to record your "transition" times from water to bike, and bike to feet, and I am working on that, somewhere in my head - but we'll just have to go with what we've got for now.

I also wondered whether the breakdown varied with the speed of the triathlete. Are the faster folks just fast, or do they have a different strategy for conserving energy in what is a gruelling event. My answer is a tentative yes. Looking at Olympic distance, the typical time breakdown is 20.2% swim / 49.0% bike / 30.8% run - but the faster half of the field err towards 20.0% / 49.6% / 30.4%, and the slower half are 20.5% / 48.4% / 31.1%. My suggestion is that the faster athletes use the time on the bike as an opportunity for a slight recovery, after the whole-body workout of the swim, and in preparation for the weight-bearing last-bit-of-energy hurl-yourself-at-the-finish arms-and-legs-pumping-like-a-broken-oil-rig run. The figures for Sprint distance bear this out too - quicker in the water and on foot, slower on the bike. I am warming to a sport that includes a sit down in the middle, and wonder if an accompanying cup of tea would improve things further.

In a future week I'll take a look at how training for a triathlon breaks down into the three disciplines, and the general trends on show - but the implosion caused by forcing three sports into one has thrown off enough statistics for one newsletter. For those of you bemoaning the lack of a graph this week - there is a new thing to play with - here's a triathlon league table for the major distances. The tools and toys available on the site for triathletes are still in their infancy, so if there's something you'd like to see, please let me know.

In other news - thanks for all your feedback on the proposed site redesign - generally it's all been positive, and I'm making good progress with the code changes necessary to make it happen.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Inside leg: 32". Favourite colour: Orange. Likes: rainy days and Mondays.

I'm back, and fully refreshed after a week off with the boy. At least I hope I am - I'm writing this before I go. If I don't make it back, this newsletter will send itself automatically, and I've left instructions on how to run the site, duct taped to the underside of the dog. It's not too difficult actually, you just have to remember to stir it occasionally, and maintain a useful-feature-to-detritus ratio of about one in four. No, six. I forget, but there's definitely some sort of harmonic when you get it right. It's doing it now, I can hear it screaming.

This week I want to talk about pace. I've mentioned it before, but usually alongside other stuff, and it's a headline act in its own right. And the headline would be: IF YOU WANT TO BE A FASTER RUNNER, LEARN TO SLOW DOWN. And no, we're not headlining in Opposites World, but let me explain a bit more. I don't mean you should slow down all of it - running is as much about enjoyment and general fitness as it is about breaking records - so feel free to keep running at whatever pace feels right to you. If you're just starting out, your times will improve with your overall fitness and experience, and you'll be king/queen/thing of the world. But as running becomes a habit, and you settle into something like a regular pattern of mileage, most people tend to reach some sort of peak with their pace. And it's at this point that you start to really analyse what you're doing with your training, and the rule above comes into play.

I'm a simple person, and in my Lego head there are three kinds of training run. Long Runs help you cope with distance, Speedwork helps you learn to cope with going faster, and then there's Everything Else*, and these runs usually help you cope with the rest of your life. The first two definitely involve pushing yourself in one way or another, so why not take it easy when doing the third? Life is a mixture of effort and relaxation. Coffee breaks, adverts, lunch hours, bedtime, weekends, punctuation, half terms, half time, holidays, motorway services, career breaks, years out, wax on, wax off. They all exist to give our brains, bodies and bits the opportunity to recover and regenerate - and there's no reason not to think of running in the same way. Run-walk programmes and intervals are already based around this idea.

So my point is a simple one. Move out of that grey area where all your runs are "about the same pace", and find your gears. Mix things up. If it's hard to imagine running slower, try taking the dog with you on slower runs, wear less sporty kit, run with friends and chat a lot, try an off road where it's easy to get lost, tie a piece of elastic to the cooker, and take the other end with you... anything that takes your mind off your pace. Gradually introduce some faster sessions, but make sure you take your time in doing so.

If you need further encouragement that this is the way to go, check out the following graph. The purple line shows marathon pace for runners of different speeds (in seconds per mile - sorry!) The green line shows the average training pace that these runners train at. (The little mountain in the background shows how many runners I found in each time bracket) Faster than about 3hr35, the average training pace for runners is slower than their race pace. My goodness those folks run fast - but they save it for races. Try it, and let me know how you get on.

Site news - and I'm planning a redesign to make things look a bit smarter, and to make a few things easier to use. If you'd like to have a look at the latest design, I'd be delighted to hear your feedback.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS Although I've been back all week, you may have noticed that I've been quieter than usual. I've been building a website for Men's Health & Davidoff. So if you're a man who seeks a fragrance that enhances your physical and mental strength, check it out.

*Ok, so there's hills too - but if you know that already, then surely you don't need me to tell you to slow down when you're not doing speedwork.

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. You ain't seen me, right?

I've sitting here in my holiday pants, waiting for the local shop to open so I can get some picnic supplies for our journey. To make sure you don't miss out on your newsletter hit, I've asked McGoohan to step in and write this weeks edition. If you'd like to try your hand at writing the newsletter in a future week, reply to this message. Right... I must go and roll up my trousers, and sit in an old-fashioned deck chair with my handkerchief knotted onto my head.

See you soon,
Fetch

Dear Fetchies,

Running. Hard, isn't it? Sometimes it gets so hard that there's a point when it all seems too much effort, when putting the next foot forward is a less attractive prospect than saying to a marshal "I'd like to give up now. Can you please take me home?" The run in question is usually a race but it could just as well be the local three-miler you've done a thousand times and could do again in your sleep.

Now if Fetch was here, he'd have a graph about now, taking all the readings of 'mood' from people's training logs, mapping them against route data, distance covered and time taken and he'd be able explain diagrammatically the optimum distance for wanting to jack it all in. It would be in colour and everything. I'm impressed just thinking about it. But Fetch isn't here, I am. So using the scientific apparatus of a wet finger in the air, I'd say the optimum point for wanting to give in and have a really good weep is Just Before Half-Way.

If I had employed psychologists to look into this further they would have been surprised to find that it didn't depend on the length of the race either. Just before half-way it is. Run a five-k and it's at two-and-a-half-k, run a marathon and it's the thirteen mile mark. I dare say, if I ran the hundred metres, it would take me a lot to get past having a cup of tea and a lie down at fifty.

Genuine sports psychologists - the ones who don't appear on the GMTV sofa - are very good on post-race depression - 'I didn't PB', 'I got overtaken a lot', 'I failed my urine test', 'I failed my gender test' - but can anyone counter-attack the mid race slump? And what triggers these feelings? I consulted Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie but either they didn't return my calls or were dead. Instead I did what any proper scientist would do in this position: I made up my own facts to suit my biased opinions. Here then are my scientifically analysed, 110% accurate Top Ten De-motivators.

1. Running in a bad mood - I have been known to stop mid-run to continue an argument in my head I had with someone weeks before: 'What I should have said was...'
2. Being overtaken by an old person. Or being the old person.
3. Being overtaken by someone who appears to be walking.
4. Overtaking someone early on, feeling smug, then watching them come sailing by one km further down the road.
5. Going uphill. Or worse, when running on the flat feels like going uphill.
6. Running the seventeenth lap of Croydon
7. When the km markers seem a mile apart
8. When you look at your Garmin (other personal GPS devices are available) and the pace is about two minutes per mile slower than you thought you were doing.
9. When a marshal tries to be encouraging by saying 'well done, you're almost half way'
10. Being suddenly aware of a blister growing on an earlier blister.

It's all well and good saying what's wrong. A proper sports scientist would know how to put it right. And by the look of this certificate in sports science I bought off the Internet, I *am* a proper sports scientist. So, just like a feature in one of those magazines allegedly concerned with men's health and fitness issues but really just a front for being able to show buff, oiled young men in a full-colour spread opposite a picture of a former Blue Peter presenter in her scanties, here are my Top Ten Re-motivators:

1. Scientists have identified inner-dolphins which are tiny fish-like creatures which swim around inside your brain. If they are kept sufficiently fed - on cake and biscuits - they remain happy and will make you happy in turn. Anger them at your peril. Feed your inner-dolphin. They like fish and cakes. Fishcakes.
2. On that note, try to organise your runs around pastries. I managed to force my children to do several long-distance paths through the promise of a cake at the end. The North Downs Way to them is a series of tea-rooms and branches of Greggs.
3. Don't ever run uphill. Choose a circular route that goes downhill all the way.
4. Don't run laps. Ever. If a town marathon requires that you do laps just ask yourself why they're keeping you from the other side of town and what it is they're trying to hide.
5. Stop getting older. This may require a lot of concentration.
6. Failing that, be older than everyone else in a race. This probably happens eventually anyway.
7. To prevent blisters, coat your feet in Vaseline, Compeed, surgical spirit and three pairs of socks. This may require shoes which are a couple of sizes larger than normal.
8. Go faster. That way the race will be over sooner.
9. When you are approaching a marshal, before they speak, get your retaliation in first. Say 'Well done, you're nearly there now' and see the look of confusion on their face as they wonder which of you is racing and which is marshalling.
10. And the absolute copper-bottomed, numero-uno remotivator. If you feel like quitting half-way through, say, a half-marathon, do it! Then record it on Fetcheveryone as a 6.55 mile PB. By quitting at different points in races you can build up an exciting portfolio of unusual race distances. 'I'm trying to break two hours and 5 minutes for my 8.37 mile PB'. Sit on top of the 4.85 mile race league!

You know this so-called article was going to be 1800 words but now I've done 900 I think that in keeping with my own advice I'll just st...

McGoohan

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. No really, don't break anything - I *am* watching.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-30 30 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-30 Dear Fetchies,

It's 11.30 at night, and I'm sitting in a garden chair in the awning of my parents' caravan. The dog, the boy, my sister and two nephews are all sleeping in various alcoves and cupboards, and I'm drinking a can of John Smiths, eating blackberry Chewits (but wishing they were Maltesers), trying to catch up with some work, and sleep at the same time. None of that is relevant to the content of the newsletter, aside I suppose from setting your expectations at an appropriate level.

Time for some Numberwang now, and this week, I thought I'd have a little think about cross-training, which is shorthand for "doing things that aren't running". Is it an excellent way to improve your cardio-vascular health, whilst giving your running parts a bit of a break, or does it just tire you out and introduce you to a wider range of specialist apparatus?

I looked at roughly 5229 half marathon performances, and found that about 25-35% of people had recorded at least 10 cross-training entries (swim, bike, and all the other sports) in the 16 weeks prior to race day, and 15-20% had recorded at least 20 entries. I wonder is there a popular plan somewhere on the web that advises staying away from cross-training for people wanting to break 1hr40. There seems to be a general veering away from cross-training as the running gets faster. I think that faster runners tend to have a longer-term view of training plans - and that the bulk of the last four months before a big race will be about focussing, rather than building up basic endurance. So it kind of makes sense that they tend to focus more closely on their running. I think. Let me know.



In previous newsletters I've looked at the typical mileage people record in the build-up to 10k's and Half Marathons, and noted a number of factors that affect how this mileage varies, like age and sex. So I thought I'd see whether the folks who cross-train tend to run more or less miles than those of us who just run. To keep things simple, I compared the typical mileage of a group who only ran, to a group who had bike-inated at least ten times in the 16 week period before their race. I found that overall, there was a very slight reduction in the amount of running that the bikers did. Of course the waters are very muddy, due to the huge variation of personal goals and styles of data recording, and the fact that my bike has a basket on the front and two saddles.



Site news - I'm very pleased to announce that Fetch Everyone Running Club has donated £788.01 from its first year of existence to Macmillan Cancer Care. The club has just short of 100 members, and we donate all the spare funds (after paying UKA affiliation fees, and Hendo's appearance fees) to a different charity each year. Come to think of it, we're probably due to donate our second year of spare cash too, I'll get on to that. If you want to be a member of a running club, and pay less for entering most races, you're welcome to join - just fill in the application form. I'll be honest, and say that if you can find a club local to you (howay the mighty Long Eaton RC!), you'll get a huge benefit from joining in with them instead, but we do have shiny membership cards with ASCII bosoms on them.

Next week... I'm taking my boy on holiday, so you won't hear from me. However, you'll still get a newsletter - I've asked McGoohan (Fetchie number 137 - he doesn't just remember when all this was fields - he helped water the seedlings) if he'll stand in as guest writer, and he's agreed. As I write this, I've no idea what he's going to say, but I'm very excited to read it!

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Tough on training, tough on the causes of training.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-23 23 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-23 Dear Fetchies,

I started well with my newsletter prep this week. I sat in Starbucks on Saturday afternoon with my lappie and a cappie, and pretended I was writing my first novel, but actually I was writing this newsletter. You all said some very lovely things about last weeks newsletter - even the unsubscribers managed to include a bit of lower case when replying, and it's given me a shot of confidence to mix things up a bit with the newsletters, not always focussing on graphs and numbers (*pushes glasses up nose*). The week has ended in the usual franticness though, due to a medical emergency overseas, I am balancing work, looking after my boy, and playing games with Maltesers.

That said, I can feel the twitchy anticipation of several thousand number fans bearing down upon me, so it'd be cruel not to soothe the beast with some statcrack. The first graph showing the typical mileage completed by 10k runners in the 16 weeks before their race. A typical 32 minute runner clocks up 1000 miles in 16 weeks, and the curve flattens out at about 200 miles - so if you're looking to complete your first 10k, I'd suggest about 12 miles a week as a good distance to build to.



Next, I thought I'd look at the shape of those 16 weeks. Do 10k runners build to a peak mileage, and then drop back? Or is that just for marathon runners? Are there other peaks and troughs? Well... unless my eyes deceive me, the 35 minute runners show signs of a definite training cycle, with some fairly regular ups and downs in their training. There's less of a pattern amongst slower runners, but there's a slight upward trend - mileage tops out the week before race week (i.e. at least 7 days before the race), and our runners typically record their lightest week in the 7 days before the race. So don't get too worried if life gets in the way in the week of your race - just make sure the week before was a good one, and give your body time to recover and bottle up some running fizz.



Site news now, and you may have noticed some new Facebook and Twitter icons appearing across the site. If we are Fetchies, are they Facebookies, and if so, what odds can I get on my eyebrows finally merging in the middle? Through the magic of the internet, you can now connect Fetch to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and have it automatically send updates to both. If you've got your finger (or maybe your HRM) on the pulse, you'll have noticed this feature has been around since last week, but I'm making slow progress towards making it all a bit smarter - you'll soon be able to control exactly what's sent, to avoid overwhelming your non-running friends with just how runny you are. Give it a go, and let me know what you think - all suggestions appreciated.

A bit of unfortunate news next, coupled with some hope. We were hoping to hold an organised weekend of running in September (aka "Fetchstock"), but sadly the uptake has been a bit too low. From what I know, most of your hesitations have come from the cost of an entire weekend, and lack of match fitness when it comes to bare knuckle boxing. So we're going to have a bit of time to think about a different approach - maybe scaling things back, organising a straightforward race, and buying a big plate of chips. Details soonish.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS And I can see this becoming a feature, I had an email from a bloke called Pete Hooper aka 'keelerunner'. He's put together a book called Best of the Fells, which as you can imagine, is a book full of fell racing stories. All proceeds from the book will go to UK Mountain Rescue.

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Gah! Roll me a malteser.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-16 16 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-16 Dear Fetchies,

I think this is what people in the world of journalism call pressure. It's not only deadline day, but it's also past lunchtime on deadline day, and I'm staring at a blank canvas. I should really stop doing the first draft of the newsletter in watercolours, and learn to use a word processor, but you lose the feel that way. Anyway, very fortunately I have prepared some bits and bobs to thrill you with, so hang on a moment whilst I dig out my spreadsheets, and see what I had in mind.

Oh gosh. It was going to be something about 10k's, but the spreadsheet is nearly a fortnight old, and all I can see are masses of 1's and 0's, a bit like Neo in The Matrix, but a bit more like the sheet music inside a barrel organ, which must make me the monkey on the top, dancing for your money. So let's ditch the stats for this week, and I'll have a bit of a ramble, and see just how many "Please remove my details from your database" responses I get.

For the benefit of those of you that are new to Fetch, I thought it might be nice to explain a little bit about how the site came to be. Back in 1999, I watched this scene from Leon: The Professional. My fondness for red wine caused me to misremember, but the idea stuck, and the domain name was born. I had a thought about holding a party in Caerphilly Castle, whereby I invited my friends, and they invited theirs, and so on, but frankly I lacked the organisational skills, and the everyone, so the site remained in patient silence for another four years.

An increasing belly, and frustration at my village cricketing prowess at the end of 2003 led me to an induction at my local gym. The instructor was half my age, sporting a young offenders moustache, and I told him there was no point showing me the treadmill, because I hated running. A week later I finally let go of the sides, and a month later, I ran my first complete mile, in about fifteen minutes. My first race finished on sacred ground in the Millennium Stadium, and the electric current that ran through me as I lapped the pitch confirmed to me that my journey to the dark side was complete.

I was soon up to my ears in spreadsheets full of training data and pictures of me covered in big copyright symbols, and they found their home on Fetcheveryone, so I could look at them at work, and at home, without having to email them back and fore, or else carry them round in a little heart-shaped memory stick.

The spreadsheets slowly turned into a database with a web front end as my habit became more demanding, and it occurred to me that I could make these tools available to others, so I started a couple of threads on Runner's World. The feedback I got was amazing, and no-one seemed to mind that I never test my code before putting it live, because it made things quicker and more fun - I think this approach was a defining moment to the site. I won't name names, but you know who you are, and I thank you enormously for helping to shape not just the functionality of the core parts of the website, but also its ideology. It also helped enormously that you kept bumping the thread. You guys Fetched Everyone.

In 2006, we'd collected 6000 registered users, and the site was moving along nicely, but also costing more than a few quid to keep running, and struggling a little with the volume of traffic. Whilst training very badly for my first marathon, I got an email from Runner's World. They bought me pizza, asked if I had lost weight recently, nodded sagely at all the right moments, and asked to buy the site, and to hire me to look after it. It took me about 8 months to make the decision that it was the right thing to do, and I remember the depth of feeling it produced amongst the Fetchies at the time. I do hope that any doubts about the decision have faded, although I still wonder from time to time whether the site is just a cover for an international kitten laundering operation. But despite a few adverts, and the occasional meeting to discuss numbers and things, they let me get on with it, and I can't hear any purring.

I still find it weird to think that this has happened to me. Last month we were visited by over 50,000 individuals, and yet it still feels like I know most of you. I do get the occasional email that begins "Hey guys...", and in those circumstances, I feel obliged to read it out to the dog. He says hi.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS In a nod to my corporate overlords, I am delighted to tell you that the lovely people at Sports Tours can organise everything you need to run the New York Marathon. They say that places are filling fast, but they'd be delighted if you'd consider putting some business their way. If you're from a company that sells things, and would like a polite mention in a future PS, let me know.

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Bear with. Bear with. Bear with.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-09 9 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-09 Dear Fetchies,

I've waited all year for it to get hot, and now it's here, I'm baking like Mr Kipling. I've done all my running at 9am, and spent the rest of the day walking round as slowly as possible. Saturday was another 5km at Milton Keynes parkrun, and though I was pleased with my time, the splits reveal an impressive start, and a gradual implosion. I tend to start off great, and then spend the next 4.97km working out how much I'm allowed to slow down. It got me thinking whether this was a common approach, or whether the faster folks take a more even approach, or even wind up the speed as they go. I know that the whippets on the TV always seem to spend the first couple of kilometres sussing out the competition and then go crazy in the last kilometre, but I thought it'd be good to see whether there were any patterns.

I started off by looking at the variation in pace between the splits. Do faster runners keep things tighter? The answer is yes. Based on nearly 2000 5k performances, the average variation in KM pace (min to max) was 14s for 17 minute runners, 28s for 23 minute runners, and 37s for 29 minute runners. So if you want to be a faster runner, tighten up those splits!



Next up, I thought I'd see if there was a tendency to run a particular part of the race faster. I looked at all the race performances, at each kilometre split, and worked out what proportion of the runners ran each split faster than their average pace. So for example, only 30% of runners will manage to run the fourth kilometre faster than race pace. It fits nicely with my own experience - I start out well, slow down, the fourth kilometre is the hardest, and then I manage to pick up again as I see the finish, and smiley faces, and cameras, and realise I've got no more running to do that day, and throw all the logs on the fire.



But that's just my experience - how do the faster people cope? I took the previous graph, and split it up, to show a few different pace bands. It seems that going out fast is more common in quicker runners (*touches finger to shoulder, and makes sizzling noise*) - 80% of 17-18 minute runners will go faster than their overall race pace, compared to 50% of 29-30 minute runners. The slower runners seem to cope better in the fourth kilometre, with 40% of them breaching race pace, compared to just 15% of the racing snakes. So it seems that the key to a fast 5km lies in going out fast, hanging on, and booking a photographer for the finish line.



I won't spend too long mentioning the W___d C_p this week, suffice to say that our WAVA game enters its final stage. I have to say with all conviction, it's been about as exciting as the real thing, but we're down to the final eight teams now, so it's nearly over... and it's actually quite close at the top. 0.25 points separate "Mainly London Really" from "The M4 and a bit More" - a few decent performances could see a new leader. The teams now need fifty scorers, so it's worth checking to see if you can help in the final push.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I'm good for a few credits on Sunday, if you fancy a flutter. It's a long way back to the pavillion if you don't like cucumber sandwiches.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-02 2 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-07-02 Dear Fetchies,

Aargh! It's deadline day, and here I am, writing the newsletter. Fortunately, I got woken up early by whichever neighbour it was that decided to do some leaf blowing / bark chipping / industrial scale sausage making at 6.45 this morning, so I'm raring to go, if a little crusty round the edges. As I said in my Twitter feed (is that the right word? Aren't they more like canapés?), this week I'm going to expand on my half marathon analysis from last week. I mentioned that some runners achieve the same performance on fewer miles than others, and I thought I'd have a look at some of the reasons why.

First up, I thought I'd look at whether there's a difference between men and women. Obviously I'm aware that there are differences, but that's a whole other newsletter (on a whole other website). So here's a nice graph showing the differing mileages between the two at half marathon distance. In keeping with ISO regulations, the men are in blue, and the ladies are in pink. As an example, a typical man would run about 250 miles to break 2:00, but a typical woman would run 300 miles. It's tough news for the faster women - they typically cover at least 20% more mileage than men. However, down below the 2:00 mark, it's the men who have to turn in more miles.



Next up, I thought I'd see how age plays a part. We've already seen how it has an impact on your race times, but does it also require you to turn in more miles for the same results? The bad news is unfortunately yes, but the good news is that the difference isn't huge. Once you smooth out some of the bumps from the graph below, it seems that people in their 50's tend to do about 11% more than the average mileage, whereas people in their 20's tend to do about 11% less than average.



There are a whole heap of other major factors that play a part in how your training goes. Running 5 miles every day for 16 weeks will not earn you a sub-1:25 half marathon. If you've enjoyed reading this, I can also maybe look at the impact of speedwork, cross-training, terrain, variation in pace, being a member of a club... lots of options really - too many to cover in one newsletter anyway. Let me know what you'd like to hear about, otherwise next week's newsletter will be all about the ducklings I saw on my run last night.

Other news now and we're now into the Super 16 phase of the WAVA World Cup. A quick recap - the UK has been split into zones (see which zone you're in), and the runners in each zone have to run as fast as they can at races during June, to help their zone score most points. The top eight teams on Friday morning will progress to what pundits are already calling the Super 8. It's looking very much like the London zone will cream it, but they said that about Argentina in 2006.

A little bit of site news - go check out your routes - I've tidied up the route pages a bit, and added an "Elevation" tab, so you can now see just how hilly your runs are. The elevation data being used comes from Google, so it's as omnipotent and spanky as you might expect. Suggestions for improvement, and bug reports are very welcome.

And finally (with apologies to people who rarely use the site, who won't have a clue what this is about, and apologies to people who regularly use the site, and know exactly what this is about), a special birthday - it's two years today since the inception of the Wednesday Lurkerthon - and to celebrate, GregP invites you to an anniversary lurk. What?

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, let me know by replying to this email. If you want to carry on using the site without receiving these newsletters, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". We can still be friends. Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I wonder if your email provider will filter out this email because of the phrase "industrial scale sausage". Matron.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-25 25 Jun 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-25 Dear Fetchies,

For those of you that sobbed uncontrollably at the absence of a graph last week, I thought I'd treat you to four colourful curves. It's time to get back to some proper running analysis, so I'll cut the jibber-jabber and get on with it. A few newsletters ago, I looked at the race calendar, and discovered that autumn is boom time for half marathons, so if you're aiming to kick the pants out of an autumn half, it's time to start thinking about it. The Fetch database is very useful for this sort of thing, with 9,307,690 miles of running logged, and 36,345 half marathon performances recorded - so I got my sieve and a big floppy prospectors hat, and panned these nuggets to help you shape your training plan. These figures all relate to the 16 weeks prior to race day. Ready?



The red graph shows you the typical mileage that you'll cover before a half marathon. For example, if you're aiming for a 1:40, you'll probably cover something like 358 miles, whereas the minimum distance is about 200 miles. Gets really sharp for those fast folks, doesn't it?



Next up, old yeller here shows how many days of the week you spend training. It's a pretty consistent three days a week until you get down to about 1:45, then it starts to climb... 4 days for a 1:30, 5 days for a 1:20, 8 days to break the world record.



The blue wobbly thing isn't the sea, it shows how far your longest run will probably be. Most runners on the slower side of 1:50 will do about 9-10 miles as their longest half marathon training run. I found it surprising how few runners covered longer than race distance.



Finally, I looked at peak mileage, i.e. how many miles should you run in your biggest week before the big day. Everyone, it seems, will run at least one twenty mile week, but this requirement climbs steeply once you start looking for sub-2, so much so that a typical peak week for a 1:40 runner is nearly 40 miles, 60 miles for a 1:25 wannabe, and 80 miles for a 1:15 chaser.

Many of you will have devised training plans, or else found them online, in training manuals, or been given them by your club coach, or barman. It'd be great to hear how these various plans compare to the data, so please drop me a line and let me know your experiences. The values I've presented are a middle ground between extremes. For example, although the median mileage for a 1:40 half is 358 miles, a quarter of runners ran their 1:40 off the back of 275 miles or less, and a quarter ran 462 miles or more. There are any number of other factors that play a part in how you perform, so don't treat anything you read here as law. If I could make laws, I'd make gnats and stingy nettles illegal.

There's just time to give you a quick update on the Fetch WAVA World Cup. Most of the groups are proceeding as expected, but group D is hosting a tight match between "M11 - Road To Nowhere" & "Newcastle-Alongside-Stuff", whilst "Notts-Scuncaster" and "The Yorkshire Daves" are making group H so hot you could paint it orange and call it a fire. Make sure you record all your races before June 25th, to help your team progress to the next round.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without this particular experience, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Please drop me a line. They keep me under the stairs, and feed me toast, because it's easy to post under the door.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-18 18 Jun 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-18 Dear Fetchies,

It's not unusual for ads on the telly to make me feel my life is deficient. My skin could look ten years younger, I'm not spending enough time with my named financial advisor, and I don't pay anywhere near enough attention to my digestive transit, to name a few. But in the last few weeks I've discovered that, not only could my life be made better by following the advice of the beautiful people, I could also enjoy the things I was already planning on quite enjoying, but more, thanks to the magic of the World Cup. Soft drinks will taste better, bookmakers will make me feel better as they take my money, Eng-er-land will score more goals if I treat myself to HD goalposts, and my digestive transit will look great with some plastic flags on the wing mirrors.

So it's with my sincere apologies that I introduce the Fetch WAVA World Cup, which will definitely make your life better, if only because it's only tenuously connected with football, and it'll give you something else to do while everyone else is watching it and drinking their bodyweight in Stella.

I've divided a map of the UK up into big squares, and picked the 32 squares with the most Fetchies in them. Each of these squares represents a team (find out which one you're in). They've all been given names, but if you'd like to propose something a bit cleverer, let me know. The population of these squares varies, so you might feel a bit hard done by if you live in a quiet area, or a bit close to the edge, but unfortunately that's the reality and the magic of the cutthroat world of sport. At least you stand out and have a good chance of making your mark, unlike those poor unfortunates in the densely populated urban zones who are climbing over their own grannies just to get enough air to complete their next mile.

Your team has been randomly allocated into one of eight groups, and your first mission is to help the team progress to the next stage by finishing in the top two positions. You do this by making sure you record a race in your Race Portfolio somewhere between June 1st-25th, and running it to the best of your ability. The performances by your team are ranked according to WAVA score, and the top 20 scores are used to calculate the overall team performance. You may not be top of the table, but as we all know, winning the World Cup is all about having a strong squad, and not getting beered up and falling off a pedalo in the middle of the night. The 16 teams that progress will fight it out over the following two weeks to decide the winner.

GROUP A: "Mainly London Really", "The Titans of Ipswich", "East Lothian, The Kingdom and Unfortunately Dundee", "Largely Edinburgh, Nearly Glasgow"
GROUP B: "Peaked Too Soon", "The Yellowbelly Coast", "The White Cliffs", "Swansea & Exmoor United"
GROUP C: "The M4 and A Bit More", "Dartmoor", "Hereford-and-then-some", "Real Riviera"
GROUP D: "Brum & Have A Go", "Snowdonia", "M11 - Road To Nowhere", "Newcastle-Alongside-Stuff"
GROUP E: "Glasgow Ranginess", "The Edge of Aberdeen", "Bournemouth-and-Sea", "York-On-Sea"
GROUP F: "Taffs and Worzels (hands across the sea)","Swind-hampton","Preston Lakes", "Camelford United"
GROUP G: "Leicspeterbedton Keynes", "Portsmouth and not much else", "Belfast", "The Roads To Aberdeen"
GROUP H: "Manpool", "Notts-Scuncaster", "The Yorkshire Daves", "Dumfries"


There's no prize on offer so far, but if there's someone reading this who'd like to be the official sponsor, please step forward. That's about all there is to say for this week, except to reassure those of you for whom this has no appeal, that I won't be banging on about it for the next month like the rest of the world, just including a little progress report alongside the usual racing analysis. Send this to all your running friends and clubmates, look after your metatarsels, and remember - football might be coming home, but running's going out and getting it done, and not falling over every time a three-year-old overtakes you.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Please keep sending the feedback, it's the most exciting bit for me. Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without this particular experience, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I've seen 'em given.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-11 11 Jun 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-11 Dear Fetchies,

Something special happens in the Fetch family in July. My dad is running his first ever race (the Aberdare 10k), having taken up running a few years back. He started with a bit of purposeful power mincing along the sea front on holiday (stopping to sign a few Ronnie Corbett autographs on the way), and over months and years, slowly sewed together a bunch of jogs, trots and canters. He now averages fifty miles a month, and runs 2-3 times a week, often as much as ten miles at a time, which is more than I manage in a week sometimes.

If I'm very lucky, I might get under 48 minutes at the 10k, and my dad will finish in about an hour. Unless I am engulfed in volcanic ash, we both know who's going to cross the line first - so how do we decide who buys the isotonic shandy afterwards? The answer is WAVA (click to calculate your score), a system that aims to level the playing field for runners of all ages. The male world record for a half marathon is 58:23 (Zersenay Tadese), but the fastest time by an over-60 runner is a bus-pass busting 1:14:15 (Patrick Roussel), and for a 80-year-old, it's a denture defying 1:39:28 (John Keston). Now I'm no Tadese, and my dad is no Roussel, and even Keston is faster than both of us, but WAVA works because these guys have marked out the shape of a curve that we can use to measure ourselves against. Your age and race time are put into a big bucket full of maths, and a number between 0 and 100 comes out. If it's 100, you should call Norris McWhirter straight away.

It occurred to me that my best WAVA ratings were coming from shorter races. Am I built for speed (haha!), or is there something skewiff with WAVA? Both might be true of course, but I looked at 1797 runners, who had each run a 5k, a 10k, a half, and a full marathon. If WAVA was uniform across the board, I'd expect to find no relationship between distance and WAVA score. And as this newsletter wouldn't be so exciting if that were true, I think you can guess where I'm going with this.



Move your finger along the top of the graph until you hit your WAVA score for 5k, 10k, or half marathon, then down until you hit the appropriate curve (yellow for 5k, red for 10k, and blue for half marathon). For example, my best half marathon time gives a WAVA of 55.9. Using the blue curve, this gives a reading from the right axis of about 1.15. I divide my 55.9 by this figure, to give a WAVA prediction of 48.6 for the marathon (my actual marathon WAVA is 48.99).

It looks very much like there's a "loss of WAVA", particularly at lower speeds, as race distances get longer. 95% of people have a lower WAVA when comparing half marathon to full, and over 50% drop at least five WAVA points. Interestingly, the curve is pretty flat between 10k and half marathon (i.e. your WAVA at 10k will probably be about the same as your WAVA at half marathon), and bends slightly in the opposite direction from 5k to 10k. I think a lot of folks find 10k's and half marathons to be a decent balance of speed and endurance, without the extremes of pain that accompany 5k's and marathons. It's also true that for many marathon runners, completion is often a higher priority than speed, and that 5k seems to have become the international standard distance for introductory running and/or post-race socialising.

I need to get training now, because I've just plugged my dad's details into the WAVA calculator, and 60 minutes for a 63-year-old beats 48 by a 34-year-old. It's going to be close - but I'm very proud of him, and may still be if he beats me. I've also just told 40,000 people about the Ronnie Corbett thing.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS Congratulations to Tigger and Dyslexic, who tie the knot today - nice one folks!

And the producer said to me... Please keep sending the feedback, it's the most exciting bit for me. Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without this particular experience, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Language Timothy!

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-04 4 Jun 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-06-04 Dear Fetchies,

I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my car at a lovely peaceful campsite. Arnie is beside me at the wheel, and I have the laptop on my knees, and a glass of red wine at my side (a bit of insulation for the tent later). We've just been for a lovely run through the fields, and woods full of bluebells. I got horrendously lost at one point, and my Garmin started bleeping low battery, but thankfully I have no sense of direction, and managed to run a complete loop without realising. I still had to scramble through a ditch full of stingies though, as penance.

I like running in new places, which leads me rather clumsily into this weeks geekery. In response to my requests for suggestions, Lorraine from the south coast asked if I could see whether certain parts of the country held more races than others. So, jewellery, jewellery, jewellery, now then, now then... I divided the whole of Britain up into 400 little boxes, and counted the races from 2009 in each one. For those of you who worry about me, it's ok, I got the computer to do it - it's easier all round, and keeps string costs at a minimum.



Some regions have races that run every week, but I've only counted these once. A few races also seem to have fallen into the sea, but it's tough trying to fit the whole of Britain into your inbox, so excuse a few rounding errors. Incidentally, some of the boxes have a lot of sea in them, which is bad news in terms of having enough room for races, but good because hey, you live by the sea, and it's very pretty.

I've highlighted the top 10% of boxes, and from my patchy knowledge of UK geography, I can see there's a focus around densely populated areas, as you might expect. There are some sparse regions, mainly in the wilder parts of the country, but the loss in quantity is made up for in spades by the gorgeous scenery and rapidly changing cruel weather conditions. I've also marked two white lines on the map that divide the country equally in racing terms, between north and south, and east and west. You can decide amongst yourselves whether these are valid dividing lines for the regions, as I've no desire to be chased out of town by a pack of angry whippets / labradors / sheep / relatives / [insert your favourite grossly inaccurate mass stereotype here]. One final point of interest, is that this puts the centre of the racing universe just outside Leamington Spa!

I'll be revisiting this map again in a few weeks, for a bit of a competition, so get your fastest running daps on. That's all from me for this week - the dog is snoring, and I'm very well insulated. Keep sending your suggestions and lovely words please.

Happy Running,
Fetch

PS If you like the idea of running with a dog, but would find the full-time commitment tough, why not google your local dog rescue place, and see if they have a scheme for volunteers? My sister and her family walk dogs at a local rescue place in Llanelli (Many Tears Animal Rescue), and they're always looking for help to keep the dogs exercised.

Are you still reading? Gosh, I like you. Please keep sending the feedback, it's the most exciting bit for me. Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without this particular experience, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. I admire your dedication, but you really should stop reading now.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-28 28 May 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-28 Dear Fetchies,

Now things are starting to get weird. I'm writing the third newsletter, but I'm just about to send the second one out. I can see now why magazines release their July editions sometime around Christmas. Anyway... thank you all for some wonderful feedback - it's given me confidence that this idea can work, and if it doesn't, it's officially your fault. I'm using the wi-fi in the public library - I like to move round a bit when I'm working, to keep things interesting, and I've just had an enormous bag of crisps!

I've recently started increasing my own running, after a bit of a fallow year... mainly at the Milton Keynes parkrun. Have you tried parkrun? Fabulous, free, easy to be part of, and before too many visits you find yourself plotting how to destroy your nemesis, and then having coffee and a laugh with them all afterwards (whilst plotting how to destroy them). Anyway... I'm not here to tell you about parkrun (do a parkrun!), I want to talk about improvement.

One of the things about running that draws you in, is that your early PBs tumble like skittles, as your body learns to race, and your mileage creeps upwards. Because I've not raced much in the last year, my parkrun times are improving in leaps and bounds, and it's been a lot of fun. In tribute, I thought I'd look at 5k's, and at how an average runner improves in their early racing life. Of course, you are anything but an average runner, and these numbers have been steamrollered flat, so if you find yourself on the wrong side of a curve, don't worry. If we all ran the same, there'd be no need for these newsletters at all. Yes? Good! On with the show.



Run your finger (or at least a mind finger) along the bottom row until you find your first ever 5k time - then move directly upwards. The different coloured regions show how much your time can improve over 2, 3, 5 and 10 races. For example, my first 5k time was 23:30, so the graph suggests I should take about 9% off in my first ten races, bringing me down to 21:23. I'm a bit behind that, with a best of 21:31, but it really is just a ballpark figure. If that's all a bit technical, try this handy tool.

There are two more important things to note about the graph. Firstly, the percentage improvement gets smaller the more races you do. That 9% improvement after 10 races is only 13.4% after fifty! It's common sense really - otherwise you'd run out of percent completely, and end up being at the start and end of the race at the same time. Secondly, we all admire the speed and athleticism of the faster folks - but they really are at the sharp end of this graph and have to work really hard to improve. It's fun to beat PB's, but eventually it gets VERY hard. I reckon the crisps will help though.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Please keep all your lovely feedback coming, it's really inspiring. Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without hearing me prattling on, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. Is this thing still on? I can't believe they put me in with those people.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-21 21 May 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-21 Dear Fetchies,

Here I am, writing the second edition of the FE weekly newsletter (complete with facelift), and it's pretty strange because I've not even sent the first one out yet. I really hope you all liked it, that you sent me lots of good suggestions for things I can talk about on a running / website theme, and that no-one came to my house and poured soy sauce in my keyboard. If you've not sent me your suggestions, please do.

It occurred to me recently that running comes with its own language that we pick up over time. It sounds far more Star Wars to don a base layer and a pair of twin-skins, than it is to stick on your pants & vest, and a nice pair of thick socks. And the less said about Fartleks the better. Even winter, summer, and the bits in between become cross country season, fell season, spring and autumn marathon season...

I thought it would be good to look at the Race Finder to see how these seasons pan out and how the distances interact. If nothing else, it'll be good to see what sort of race analysis I should be doing in the coming months. The results were quite interesting thankfully (although be fair, this is a weekly column - if you want the Theory of Relativity, jump in a taxi). The following graph shows the number of races in each month, in 2009, broken down by distance.



There are definite marathon peaks in spring and autumn. Half marathons peak just before and just after the marathon spring peak, and before the autumn marathon peak. 10k races peak in May, and also in September, whilst 5k's are most popular in June, at the height of the Race for Life series. I wonder whether the 5k & 10k peaks in May & June have anything to do with new runners entering the sport on the back of VLM, or existing runners coming down from marathon training and looking to smash their bests.



Looking at race terrain, road racing forms the bulk of the calendar with 54% of all races (although this *may* just be because it's the default option). The graph above shows alternative racing environments, and their popularity throughout the year. Cross-country season blossoms from October to March, whilst the trails, fells, and running tracks reach their peak in June, before falling back in July and August as the best season of them all arrives - holiday season!

That's it for this week - but before I go, a quick mention to the Brathay Challenge - twelve insane runners doing ten marathons on consecutive days. The Brathay Trust works hard to help vulnerable young people, and these fabulous runners have raised over £18,000 to help the cause. I'm proud to say that five of the runners are Fetchies, you can read all about them here http://www.fetcheveryone.com/10in10.php

Happy Running,
Fetch

Please tell me what you think about the newsletter - it's a bit strange sending 20,000 emails into the ether, and not knowing whether they're being well received, and the last thing I want to do is annoy you with junk. Your privacy is your right - let me know by reply if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely. If you want to carry on using the site without hearing me prattling on, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP. You can stop reading now, nothing else interesting happens in this bit.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-14 14 May 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-14 Dear Fetchies,

If you saw the May Race Guide, you'll have seen I'm aiming to produce a weekly newsletter, mixing running stats, information about the site, and general ramblings. I may run out of things to say, or you might decide that you completely hate them - but I shall have fun trying to keep you entertained. Because it's just me here behind the scenes, I think the trick will be to get a few weeks ahead of myself, so I don't get derailed every time I get a cold or a dose of CBA. I'm writing this in 2012, and Paula has just won the Olympic marathon in a pair of rocket boots.

It's hard to write about running at this time of year without feeling the gravitational pull of The marathon. Whether you love it, hate it, or make a point of being spectacularly indifferent, the London marathon creates a lot of emotion, and brings a lot of people to running. There are definitely new people on the streets this week - so now's the time to extend a friendly hand, and make sure a few of them stay with us long term.

There's often a suggestion that the folks who run London return to their sofas for the rest of the year, or the rest of their lives even... so I thought I'd investigate what becomes of the runners, after the big show. The class of 2009 currently boasts 907 Fetchies.

Of these, 65 never visited FE again after April (I can only assume these folks all now live under the sea), 182 (20%) stopped visiting before the end of the year, but I'm very pleased to see that 629 (nearly 70%) of the runners are still with us. I don't know what the overall stats are for folks who run London, but it seems that there's one thing you can do to keep running - keep Fetching!

Of our 907 marathoners, a solid 729 of them raced again, 267 between 1-5 times, 157 between 6-10 times, and 305 suckers for pain have completed more than 10 races since April 2009. In terms of distance, 16% of these races were 5k-ish, 33% were 10k-ish, 28% were half marathon-ish, 19% were marathony and 4% were ultras.

So 77% of the runners who raced again have not done another marathon. I hope this helps people to handle one of the problems of being part of a running community or club. Often the most vocal people are the ones who think nothing of running five or six marathons every weekend, and that only getting out for a run three times a week is a clear sign that you must be injured... it's easy to feel pressured into doing more. Running offers a near bottomless pit of ways to torture yourself in the name of improvement, but there are lots of different distances to have fun with, and of course you don't even have to race. Find a friend or find your favourite music, find a nice place, find a nice pace, and go for it. You can wear a costume too if you like that sort of thing.

Happy Running,
Fetch

Whether you liked the newsletter or not, please reply and let me know. I'm aiming to do this every week now, so I'd really like to hear your suggestions for content, and criticism for improvement. Your privacy is your right - if you'd like me to remove you and all your data from our database completely, also let me know by reply. If you want to carry on using the site without hearing me prattling on, go to About You > Settings, and untick the box marked "Fetcheveryone (Natmag Rodale Ltd) can send me e-newsletters and other information". Thanks. And now the science bit... Natmag-Rodale is a limited company registered in the United Kingdom. Registered number: 00519122. Registered address: 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP.

]]> http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-07 7 May 2010 12:00:00 GMT http://www.fetcheveryone.com/newsletter.php?date=2010-05-07