running is maybe my favorite thing on the whole planet. it has given me so much and i am deeply grateful for it. if i couldn't run i wouldn't know what to do with anything...
to me, running as a human is like flying as a bird - its a good way to get around, but also an expression of freedom, motion, and feeling capable in my body. it also has taught me a lot of things about life and discipline and training, mainly in the sense that these things can be fun even though they sound like scary or hard things sometimes..
i wanna flesh this page out with some things over time:
i've learned a lot about running mostly through doing it a lot.. i've been taking it really seriously ever since 2019, and running basically constantly since then (sometimes 6days/week, sometimes 4, mostly 5). but i've also learned a lot from some external sources, that i'll share here:
this is such a great website and really contributed to getting me interested in ultramarathons and taking running seriously back when i found it in 2018. it also was my introduction to running as a nearly spiritual thing, which i hadn't ever really thought of before. i devoured probably every page on this site, it's so great! Jonathan Savage, the guy that runs it, definitely has his fair share of unorthodox opinions/practices/training methods, but he's good about specifying when he's deviating from more conventional opinion, and i think the way his brain works is really good. i don't know where i would be without this site!
this book is the single biggest influence on my training, not because it necessarily gives you a bunch of opinions that i agree with, but because the premise of the book is to educate you on the essentials of the science of what happens in your body during distance running, the ways that this informs training practices, and the ways that good coaching and training puts these things together. essentially, it's goal is to teach you how to develop your own training method built on knowledge about running, and about ones own body.
a big takeaway is that you should be running slow as heck a lot of the time to maximize your aerobic base training. over the last few years i've been pursuing a lot of this (i'd guess 90% of my milage since 2021 has been z1 or z2 aerobic base training), and it is actually kinda ridiculous to me how much better i have gotten at running. knowing how to structure my training and how to get the most out of my body (or at least knowing what i'm leaving on the table... lol) is really nice, and i don't know a better way to learn it than this book. it shares some overlap in topics to what you'll find on fellrnr, but i would prioritize the knowledge here a little more highly. fellrnr is more in depth at points, but also a little more arcane. but reading both will give you a good idea of the way to think about things.