Ready to Run

Routine maintenance on your personal running machine can be and should be performed by you.

As Christopher McDougall describes our ancestors in his book Born to Run, running was hardwired in such a way that it was indispensable to survival:

performance. It’s not about the shoes. It’s about you.

The glutes are the largest muscles in your body, and if you put them to full advantage (a life of sitting in chairs can impede on the magnificent flow of power that your posterior chain was engineered to channel), you will be using muscles that are relatively inexhaustible.

Problems are going to keep coming. Each one is a gift waiting to be opened—some new area of performance you didn’t know you had, or some new efficiency to be gained.

It’s a book for the Formula 1 runner seeking health and high performance over a lifetime. All human beings should be able and willing to perform basic maintenance on themselves. Sports medicine has its place, but you have both a right and a responsibility to know what’s going on in your body, take care of as much business as you can, and harvest an

The real game-changer is the attitude we adopt in our lives as runners: the conviction that we are responsible for taking care of our running machines like a master mechanic would.

It is really a combination of arches: the medial longitudinal arch, lateral longitudinal arch, and anterior transverse arch—analogous to a suspension bridge or a leaf spring in a car.

Alter the task-completion mindset It’s great that you have the discipline to climb out of bed at 4:30 in the morning and check your daily run off the list before the first hint of dawn. That’s fantastic. But I want more from you. I’m asking you to go the extra mile and hold the quality of your running to a higher standard. That means asking yoursel