Ready to Run

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.

These new shapes and tendencies of your tissues and joints are no longer conducive to running. You must now be reborn to run.

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.

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

No days off I’m asking for just 10 minutes a day for maintenance work, but you need to put in those 10 minutes every day. No days off, no excuses.

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:

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.

Although your body is designed to last you 110 years, you can shred through it in 20 if you try hard enough. If you have a multimillion-dollar contract in place, there may be room for debate. But if you’re running for the sheer love of it…what then?